Quiet Night Think
Quiet Night Think by Gillian Sze is a collection of finely observed poems and invitingly associative essays, in which Sze muses on language, translation, and individual words, across English, Mandarin, and her family’s dialect, Hokkien. In the essay, “Quiet Night Think,” Sze explains that the titular phrase is a translation of the name of a quatrain by Li Bai, which Sze had memorized as a six-year-old Chinese-Canadian attending Saturday Chinese school, and which she had asked her mother to translate for her back then. Now a mature poet, Sze reflects on William Carlos Williams’s definition of a poem as “a thing made up of … words and the spaces between them,” realizing:
What I was demanding of my mother was to translate that space. […] Between her scant English and my dogged determination to pry meaning out of her, we found ourselves caught in the middle of words and languages.
For her mother, writes Sze, “Loss … is what provides the space from which meaning can emerge.”
In another allusive essay, Sze describes her nights as a new mother, “sitting inside the moon,” following the Chinese practice of spending “one month housebound in order to recover from the rigours of labor.” Forbidden, by tradition, from any activity (including reading) that would make her “strain a single part” of her body, she grapples with her estrangement from the written word, before coming to see “nurturing and writing” as “equally acts of love,” two forms “of attention.”
The poems in this collection are often more plainspoken than the lyrical essays. Where the essays evoke the poet’s interior life, in the poems, Sze often turns her thinking outward, drawing on scenes from the natural world to offer subtle revelations. In “Above, the Geese,” a description of the snowmelt around a tree invokes a phrase from psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan about the place where sign and signifier meet, to create a quiet but indelible image:
A tree carries its warmth through the winter,
each one a point de capiton
around which footprints stitch themselves.