wrong epics in a godless time

The Ruined Elegance

By Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Princeton University Press ($14.95)

Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s newest collection, The Ruined Elegance, delivers a suite of poems giving voice to political figures between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. Sze-Lorrain’s poetry is animated by what Edward Said would call the unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies of culture. These energies allow the poet to render a cyclonic and fragmentary view of world history, in which artistic figures such as Debussy, Gu Cheng, and Anna Akhmatova provide a counter-narrative to Ravensbrück, Stalin’s Great Purge, and the Chinese persecution of Tibetan Buddhists before and during the Cultural Revolution. Out of darkness, out of brokenness, and out of the cloistered silence where everything lyrical begins, Sze-Lorrain summons plum-blossom-combed landscapes, old grievances, and burning palaces; the poet conjures the burned and the beautiful that she might meet and reciprocate the wanting gaze of all the world. The poem, “I Wait for the Ruined Elegance,” expresses the desire that underwrites every poem in this book: “…I want to honor/ the invisible. I’ll use the fog to see white peaches.” With cosmopolitan grace and refinement, Sze-Lorrain masterfully renders the lyric poem as a vehicle equally suitable for conveying a peach tree, a sonata, a silk duvet, and a massacre in spring.

The Ruined Elegance is divided into four sections: “Wrong Epic,” “In a Godless Time,” “The Book, A Simpler Grave,” and “Caught in Defiance.” The first section introduces “a compulsion to hold the weight of myths,” an invitation to be guests in our own inner lives, and a determination “to question the options of elegy.” This section dramatizes the confluence of Asian, European, and North American culture. Throughout this section, the larger question remains: “Can you listen without a narrative sense of self?” The second section, “In a Godless Time,” begins to answer this question somewhere between invocation and action. The poems in this section deal primarily with repression and revolution in China and Tibet. The third section, “The Book, A Simpler Grave,” surveys the limits of art when confronted with atrocity. The poems in this section dart through the carnage of gulag and concentration camp, in order to reaffirm “the unbreakable chain of names and damns” that might elevate ordinary words into music. “Caught in Defiance,” the final section, conveys a firm belief in poetry’s potential to transcend the violent wreckage caused by human brutality, to make God’s mask from a mangosteen with worms, to turn ruined thoughts into poems.

Turning ruined thoughts into poetry, Sze-Lorrain elegantly bears witness to extremities of beauty and savagery. The Ruined Elegance avows Carolyn Forché’s claim that “the history of our time does not allow for any of the bromides of progress, nor the promise of successful closure.” Instead of closure, Sze-Lorrain translates centuries of erasure in brief luminous bursts of light, as she does in the poem, “What’s Left of a Sijo,” which reads:

A stillness, a ripple,

a prayerful

instant. I wait

because you

feign movement,

thin traces of a feckless

existence. An antelope,

a noble surprise.

Wind rises, eyes

follow this idle

stanza

to a pavilion,

a civilization at

the heart of the lake

where I know

ripples are still,

white ginger lilies

hesitate,

and you listen.

The traditional Korean poetic form of the sijo appears as an elegant ruin, scattered images resist disintegration, and the stillness-of-being-here ripples out into “a civilization at/ the heart of the lake,” a submerged space, a liquid heart, where such cultural fragments might be heard and recollected. With great charisma and intelligence, Fiona Sze-Lorrain tenders us her poems that we might sift through our own wrong epics in a godless time. The Ruined Elegance asks us if we might leave the door of our own baroque melodies ajar and if we could, then, interpret the silence outside.

Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He works as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.

For more work by Dante Di Stefano, check out his page at our Online Sundries site.