For a Rising Body: On Barbara Tran's Precedented Parroting - A Review by Michael Prior
November 6, 2024
Precedented Parroting. Barbara Tran. Palimpsest Press. $21.95, 112 pp., ISBN: 978-1-990293-64-1
“I summon memories like birds,” writes Barbara Tran in “Raven Takes Wing,” the first poem in Precedented Parroting, “…If I think of them this way / the way they move // is not frightening.” Tran’s collection offers a veritable aviary of the mind, wherein birds—their migrations, their forms of flight and flaring plumage—gradually become figurative envois for a series of moving meditations on family, displacement, racism, and, perhaps most saliently, what it means to remember and to forget in a diasporic context.
While Tran pays careful attention to the materiality of many of the birds that flock throughout the book—the anatomy of a feather is evoked in exacting detail, a heron’s beak is conjured as “blue /stepped” and “sharp / as a pick”—most of the collection’s feathered creatures function within the troposphere of metaphor, and, as such, their flightpaths often circle back to the speaker’s self, such as when, in “Blue from a Distance,” the speaker imagines a feather’s barbs as “loss / encompass[ing] smaller // losses” (Tran’s staggered lineation here subtly suggests both the feather’s layered barbs and her speaker’s nesting griefs); or when, in the ars poetica, “Resilient in Rain,” the speaker, reflecting on her own writing, asks “How else will I ever learn // to find / my own feather?”
The simultaneous precarity and gravity of memory, especially in relation to notions of home, is one of Precedented Parroting’s overarching concerns. Tran’s speaker’s self-characterization as a “willful forgetter” in the book’s first pages is complicated by the collection’s central, longer sequences in which the memories the speaker has inherited, the stories she’s been told about her family’s journey from Việt Nam to America in the mid-1960s, are riven with loss’s lacunae, the uncertainties of their transmission, and the specter of America’s militarism in South East Asia: “I come from a family of / unreliable narrators” notes the speaker in “Một: Rooted.” And in “Ba: Living Room” the speaker confesses, ““My memory is an album. // The photos are not in chronological order.” // Some are out of focus. / Some are bent.”
Edward Said described exilic experience as contrapuntal, deeply shaped by the interplay between one’s current life and the vividness in memory of what one has lost or left behind. While Said articulates an experience common to first-generation immigrants and refugees old enough to clearly remember another home, another land, there is also, undoubtedly, a way in which this psychic counterpoint plays out in the lives of later generations who, through repeated stories and familial archives of albums and diaries, come to possess a different and perhaps no less insistent form of such contrapuntal consciousness—one driven by the need to negotiate the limits and meaning of their own indirect remembering. This fraught mode of generational memory hauntingly emerges in the speaker’s admission in “Ba: Living Room” that she has been “writing and rewriting this story, re-membering / and furnishing photos of empty rooms.” The clever hyphen between “re” and “membering” highlights how the speaker’s words have not only a mnemonic capacity, but also a corporeal one; they place the bodies of loved ones in time and space, attempting to map the movements of a family caught within larger, and sometimes mysterious, currents of history.
The interplay between past and present, personal and collective memory, converge in the collection’s title poem, which takes place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tran’s speaker weaves together various modes of memory by juxtaposing historical and contemporary anti-Asian violence and “yellow perilism” with the small gestures of solidarity between neighbours sharing cleaning supplies as well as the illusory solace of birdwatching. A couple sections later, “Model Rival: A Lullaby” considers the oscillating invisibility and hyper-visibility of people of Asian descent in North America (what Cathy Park Hong calls the “vague purgatorial status” of Asian Americans in the American popular imagination) while also deconstructing the “model minority” myth and stereotypes surrounding Asian women: “I too am frequently mistaken / for those only distantly / related to me…I too am viewed / sometimes as a warrior / goddess sometimes // an omen.”
Throughout Precedented Parroting, Tran’s language is precise and lucid, though not devoid of play: lines like “If you can’t say / country // without conjuring / soil / and sea” and “Boon of a breeze // carried a feather //and father” evince skillful attention to the way alliteration, slant rhyme, and assonance might forge associations and facilitate unforeseen connections or surprising shifts through time and space. In another poem, an egret is anagrammatically reconfigured into a sigil of regret while the speaker’s thoughts “scatter like sandpipers”—one can’t help but read these moments as Tran’s intertextual nods to poems by Derek Walcott and Elizabeth Bishop. The collection encompasses a gamut of stanzaic and lineal approaches to the page, from left-margin-aligned shorter lyrics like “Buttercups in Foil on the Windowsill” and “Sonnet for a Sharp-Toothed Dreamer” to poems like “Yesterday’s Bread” and “Corvid Vision,” whose typographic arrangement make of their white space a sort of field, or perhaps a sky, recalling Denise Levertov’s notion that a poem’s lineation and spacing might be a means of intonating its language and scoring the reader’s breath. In all cases, Tran is attentive to the ways in which a poem’s form might metaphorize or extend its content: a poem about family photo albums, “Unframed,” is formatted in justified lines, its blocky appearance suggesting the very photos it considers.
“Between / beginnings know // there are endings Many / endings,” Tran observes. Precedented Parroting begins with a trio of epigraphs drawn from Dickinson, Darwin, and perhaps most strikingly, the African grey parrot Alex, whose legacy, is still debated among animal psychologists. Alex famously asked “What colour?” after seeing his own reflection in a mirror—a question which recurs later in Tran’s book (in the voice of the linguist Guy Deutscher asking his young daughter to describe the hue of the sky). Alex’s query might seem simple, but gathers profundity when considered in the context of what it means to not only truly recognize the self but also to honestly confront the matrices of memory, history and language in which it is situated—a task at which Tran has poignantly excelled. Tran offers her answer to the parrot’s question in the collection’s final poem, when the speaker declares, “I am the colour / of all things // On my one eye / sits the world.”
Michael Prior's most recent book of poems, Burning Province, won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the BC & Yukon Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Amy Clampitt Residency, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Jerome Foundation, and Hawthornden Literary Retreat. Michael's poems have appeared in places like Poetry, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, PN Review, Global Poetry Anthology, Resisting Canada, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series. He edits the Véhicule Press poetry imprint, Signal Editions.