PALH BOOK REVIEWS

 

CROSSING THE SNOW BRIDGE by Fatima Lim Wilson published by Ohio State University Press, 1995, paper, ISBN 0914206816 Review by The Antioch Review, Summer 1996 v54 n3 p376(2) COPYRIGHT 1996 Antioch Review, Inc.

For any poet, and any poetry, "identities" become a question. How many are there? How do we define their borders? Are they always overlapping? This book's jacket says, "...a great part of [her] cultural identity is built upon the immigrant experience." Certainly, the forging of identity(s) and voice(s) in this book is dependent upon the dynamics of Filipino tradition, folkways, superstitions, politics, and the language Tagalog. And the forging is also dependent upon the disruption and fragmentation of experience as the identity enters and participates in another culture. In "Alphabet Soup, or Mimicry as a Second Language" (an abecedarium) Lim-Wilson discusses her own learning of English: "Mother humming her made-up melodies. She / Nudges me to move my lips with hers."

And I wonder: as readers, should we and are we able to separate a cultural experience from a "poetic" experience? How do we make aesthetic judgments without stepping on the toes of a cultural perspective? Is every trope and every device wrapped in the values and mores of one's own culture? These poems are wonderfully dense with sensual vocabulary, and Lim-Wilson is in charge of their rhythmic stitching (often three and four beat lines). The poems are sometimes engaged with her own personal rituals of forgetting and her modes of struggle as tradition hovers around her. In "China Patterns" the voice of a maternal super-ego begins by saying, "My dear, all brides have them" and later, "...Your / Future years are gleaned / In the way the handpainted leaves / Or spiked fruit cascade round / And round: ennui's cornucopia."

Molly Bendall

Review Grade: A

 

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