Something However Human
By Daryl Lim Wei Jie
Poetry/Landmark Books/Paperback/96 pages/$23.01/Obtainable right here
4 out of 5
“The kettle boils water to a crisp/ there are orang-utans within the bathtub once more/ the orchids have eaten the cockroaches…”
So begins a poem in Daryl Lim Wei Jie’s Something However Human, a kaleidoscope of acquainted photographs twisted into the alien and unusual.
With its allusions to subsidies and sheltered walkways, capitalism and capital punishment, this dazzling, pleasant assortment finds a becoming backdrop in a rustic the place love is commodified and economics erotised.
Lim, whose first poetry assortment, A E book Of Modifications, got here out in 2016, is on steadier footing right here. The pages reveal an array of intriguing photographs, from the ramrod incline of 1 Mrs Lee, who’s “hypotenuse to the railing of ageing metal”, to the Escherian turns of Narrative (III), the place “tales come to me lacking/ beginnings and stairwells”.
The guide is split into two elements: “desert of the actual”, possible a nod to a guide by Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek; and “nice reset”, a World Financial Discussion board theme.
Fairly than have interaction in a heavy-handed critique of the world and its ills, Lim holds up a funhouse mirror to it. The gathering, in consequence, typically comes throughout as a mishmash of the acquainted, a bit “processed”, however in a approach that cleverly exemplifies its material – the “cherry cola blood” of a nosebleed; the refined carbohydrates of a dessert (“exterior of a sundae/ are you aware what a strawberry/ tastes like?”).
The second half options a few of Lim’s experimental translations of Tang poems. The sparse, spaced-out renderings of Bai Juyi’s poetry are abstractions of abstractions, evoking the aesthetic of “liu bai” wherein areas of a portray are left clean. They’re competent makes an attempt.
In breaking from the formal constraints of the unique Tang poetry, they’re within the good firm of Joshua Ip’s Translations To The Tanglish (2021), which performs a Singaporean spin on Tang and Track poems, to various levels of success; and the important brushstrokes of Wong Might’s latest In The Identical Gentle: 200 Tang Poems For Our Century, the work of a extra assured hand.
Lim’s guide will resonate with many readers, even when its very best one will be the bourgeois kind who reads Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges and thinks in English whereas turning a wistful gaze to their ancestral homeland.
At their finest, these poems transfer with a playful restraint, held in curious suspension between contradictory impulses.
One among these is Expression Of Contentment, wherein the lolling languor of the day is fringed with palpable stress. The narrator’s thighs have turned to natural jam, the tree is blue, his tongue purple and the clouds develop “pregnant/ with knives”. “I’m terribly actually very/ comfy”, he declares. What a temper.
If you happen to like this, learn: Mok Zining’s The Orchid Folios (Ethos Books, 2020, $20.33, accessible right here). Mok’s debut assortment is an assemblage of poems on the orchid and different horticultural, colonial and private offshoots.