IN OCEAN VUONG'S latest collection Time Is a Mother, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet reaches for depths of what was lost.
We encounter Vuong submerged in profound and compounding grief after the death of his mother. The book’s epigraph from César Vallejo reads, “Forgive me, Lord: I’ve died so little,” touching on the guilt that can accompany those left behind after a death. These poems hold the tension between looking back and moving forward, with the awareness of someone acquainted with feelings “that made death so large it was indistinguishable / from air,” as Vuong writes in “Not Even.” Those grieving search for comfort, while also examining life before loss—sometimes recognizing that grief was always present.
Time Is a Mother is full of questions that reckon with these past experiences. One of the first poems asks, “How else do we return to ourselves but to fold / The page so it points to the good part.” Other verses ask, “What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?” and “How come the past tense is always longer?”
Vuong presents readers with vignettes of joy amid brokenness, writing with indulgence for the present tense, while expressing a sense of melancholy for what was lost. As he writes in “Dear Sara,” “none of us / are children long enough / to love it.” In “Beautiful Short Loser,” Vuong seems to respond to Mary Oliver’s question about what is wild and precious: “I am the last of my kind at the beginning of hope / Because what I did with my one short beautiful life—was lose it / on a winning streak.”
He measures his tragedy against biblical stories like those of Jonah and Noah’s ark, using his understanding of God and suffering to see how his own story might conclude. Vuong offers a gorgeous telling of God’s creation of humans in “Ars Poetica as the Maker” with lines such as “I gave it hands / despite knowing / that to stretch that clay slab / into five blades of light, / I would go / too far.”
The poems are daring and experimental, with astonishing images that linger. But the greatest strength of this collection is found in the poems’ shared context, as they work together to gesture toward Vuong’s reckoning of the past with the future. We meet him in that liminal space.
“Nobody’s free without breaking open,” Vuong writes in “Beautiful Short Loser.” In “Künstlerroman,” he explains that “After walking forever through it all, I make it to the end.” To move forward, we must risk the pain of looking back, discovering what we had overlooked or purposely forgotten. It can be like trudging through a thick forest, trying to find or make a clearing. The collection ends with this visceral image that might be a glimpse of hope: “Then it came to me, my life. & I remembered my life / the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree. / & I was free.”
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Olivia Bardo is a writer, artist, and baker from northern New Jersey and is a former editorial assistant for sojo.net.
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