By Kristina Tom

from time to new
Lydia Kwa
Gordon Hill Press (2024) / 97 pages / SGD 26.35

Lydia Kwa's most recent poetry collection from time to new is a memoir in verse form: it distils two dark, consecutive periods in the writer's life – her mother's illness and death, soon followed by Kwa's own bout with cancer – into two long poems that document the grief and upheaval triggered by these twin, life-altering events. These two poems, 'Notes on Grieving' and 'Flight from Memory', form the structural and thematic core of the collection, bookended by two sections of shorter poems that – as Kwa explains in the acknowledgments – grow "like a blossoming spiral, from this centre".

At first glance, it would appear simple enough to begin with these two core poems and discuss how they chronicle Kwa's personal journey through loss and illness. However, it is soon clear that the collection's ambitions are larger in scope: 'Flight from Memory' describes the central "conundrum" the poems grapple with as an attempt "to document what cannot / be documented". An insight into the nature of this "conundrum" can be found also in the acknowledgments, in which Kwa cites the teachings of the late Thich Nhat Hanh, particularly his reflections on impermanence and continuation, two Buddhist concepts that propose that there is no real birth or death, but rather a self in constant transformation. Keeping such a worldview in mind provides a helpful framework for understanding the poems: they document a search for enlightenment and impulse to flee memory (or, perhaps, what the speaker describes in the same poem as a "flight from fixity"), even as they, by their very nature, comprise a fixed and public memory of a mother's death and the author's cancer.

The poems' philosophical musings attempt to tease apart the existential implications of this Buddhist approach even as the imagery they employ remains grounded in the physical and tangible, a tension seen in the contrasting depictions of the speaker and her mother. Take for example this passage from 'Notes on Grieving':

back in the flat
the helper worried about ghosts

what was there to be afraid of?

my mum loved us

[…]

while in daytime, I was pale
wandering through rooms

The poem is an elegy to a departed mother, but the ghostly figure that comes to haunt the flat is the speaker herself, a daytime ghost who flits listlessly from room to room in the wake of her grief. Her mother, in contrast, is remembered as being fuelled with a will to live that seems almost violent:

complaints against the world
bruising the cheap pages of
appointment books

ballpoint scars in a melange of
English and Chinese

her hurt sensibility
almost tearing
through

The speaker leafs through the pages of her mother's old appointment books and marvels at the pressure her mother applied with pen, her words etched so deeply into paper that they almost tear through the page.

Here and throughout the rest of the poems, the mother is a force of nature who leaves behind unmistakable and even violent imprints of her presence. In 'Digging for Clams', for example, the speaker tries her "mother's magic trick" of placing clams in soy sauce, and when the shells open, she "learn[s] instantly / that slaughter is easy". This utilitarian approach to killing for sustenance is evoked again in the poem 'Two Tones', an ode to the koel bird: the speaker describes the koel's song as "beauteous in pre-dawn quiet" but warns the bird that her mother "[i]f she could – she'd roast / you for dinner". The koel bird returns with another "pre-dawn solo" in the poem 'That Bird Again', its song "suggestive of / an imaginary possible". The same bird that her mother wouldn't hesitate to slaughter and eat symbolises for the speaker a self on the precipice of enlightenment, with a song that anticipates a hitherto unrealised dawn.

As the contrasts between mother and daughter continue, it becomes less clear if the poems advocate one approach to life (practical survival) over the other (transcendence). Returning to 'Notes on Grieving', we find another direct comparison between mother and daughter:

unlike how her notes scarred paper
a whirlwind

my notes
an unspooling of energy
toward strangers

in a wish to transform
pain

A first reading of this might see the speaker's "unspooling", in contrast to her mother's "whirlwind", as an unflattering self-description of ineffectual weakness. But if we recognise the word "notes" as a nod to the poem's title and a reference to the poem itself, we might understand this "unspooling" as a self-examination meant to "transform" grief into a creative endeavour, one that is now published for "strangers" to read. Moreover, a third meaning becomes available when the poem is read through a Buddhist lens: in this reading, the speaker acknowledges the transient nature of existence and seeks to "transform pain" into compassionate acknowledgment of the suffering experienced by the self and by "strangers" in the world at large.

Multiple possible readings like these are made possible by the nonjudgmental gaze the speaker attempts to hold even as she recounts the scars left by her mother: "I neither idealize nor demonize / the welts have long dissipated". The speaker here refers to physical scars left by a "fierce tiger" of a mother who wielded her rattan cane according to the adage "mae si ai, bak si diah", or what the speaker translates as "to scold is to love, to hit is an even greater love". But as the poems progress, the speaker recounts other emotional wounds, such as her mother's inability to accept her sexual orientation and their subsequent estrangement, or as the prose poem 'Oceans, Unknowing' puts it: "Vast oceans of unknowing separate us". Immediately after this, the speaker claims, "I've long forgiven you", an unconvincing sentiment that reappears throughout the poems as a refrain meant to be more aspirational than factual.

As the poem 'Notes on Grieving' opens, the speaker returns to Singapore after a long absence to attend her mother's deathbed. This homecoming begins a new chapter of reckoning for the speaker as she continues a decades-long project of healing and forgiveness, or what she frequently describes as "draw[ing] out the heat". This reference to Traditional Chinese Medicine serves as a metaphor for the emotional labour the speaker pours into efforts to make peace with both her mother and herself. An acupuncture session, for example, references the "Lao Gong" (勞宮) or "Palace of Toil" acupuncture point, and one can easily imagine the acupuncturist as the speaker working over her own body to the point of "pain and tears" in the hopes of therapeutic breakthrough:

this is the nature of
heartbreak and anger combined
she says, as she inserts needles
to draw out the heat

Another acupuncture point is referenced in a more graphic depiction of her grief at her mother's passing:

still cradling her left shoulder with my right hand –
tether feeling transmits
phantom pain crosses

a cyst develops on the inside of
my left wrist at 列 缺 Lung 7
Broken Sequence

The speaker begins with the posture she adopted on her mother's deathbed, cradling her mother for hours just before her death. A psychic pain then passes from mother to daughter, as if contagious, manifesting as a cyst at the "Lung 7" acupuncture point. This point is often manipulated by acupuncturists to help patients with grief and letting go, but in this case, the speaker imagines a new growth physically blocking the release of these difficult emotions. Enabling this transmission of pain is a "tether", the embodiment of a genetic and karmic inheritance, and what the speaker describes as "our umbilical bridge… / …our shared karmic tie".

The speaker imagines the origins of this malady, passed from mother to daughter, as rooted in her mother's own abandonment as a child. More than once, the poems mention that she was "shipped away" to relatives as a toddler. The poems 'Notes on Grieving' and 'Oceans, Unknowing' both draw a straight line from this original mother wound – "My mother didn't love me" – to the speaker's own: "Your ache is palpable, an uneasy legacy. Your hands, weathered by years of widowhood and loneliness, afraid of touching me."

This legacy of abandonment and aversion to affection is addressed again in the second long poem 'Flight from Memory':

grief arrow
from her missed eighty-fourth year

aimed for your heart

*

how long had that cancer been growing?

Like the excess heat that must be drawn from the speaker's body during torturous acupuncture sessions, the speaker's breast cancer becomes not only a metaphor for internal emotional scars, but also a physical manifestation of them. The "grief arrow" evokes the "phantom pain" of the "tether'' and "karmic tie" described previously between mother and daughter. The speaker goes on to imagine how the struggle over this literal and metaphorical cancer might be playing out in her body:

do cells harmonize
deconstruct
or self-destruct

do they have choice

The question "do they have choice" seems to ask whether the speaker is destined to a particular fate long encoded within the cells of her body. After all, the karmic tie between mother and daughter is the source of her suffering, a profound connection that the poem sums up with the line "mother, mater, matter". But this same karmic tie also represents an opportunity for the speaker to heal the wound first inflicted generations prior. To again paraphrase the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh: developing understanding and compassion for our ancestors is necessary to achieve understanding and compassion for ourselves, and vice versa. Karmic ties between generations allow us to heal wounds that our ancestors were not able to heal in their own lifetimes. The speaker hopes to heal her wounds in the present and, as a continuation of her mother, she hopes to transform the pain of her mother's past. Breaking this legacy of suffering means that transmission of pain from one generation to the next is not inevitable. While the speaker does not quite achieve this by the end of this collection of thoughtful, sincere and compassionate poems on grief and letting go, she chooses to remain hopeful, as we see at the end of 'Notes on Grieving':

she visits frequently in dreams –
we plan trips

I'm never sure
where we're going
but it feels good to travel together

The speaker is eventually able to release her pent-up "heartbreak and anger" because even after her mother's death, she continues to travel with the memory of her mother on what the poem 'Journey' calls an "interior journey" of transformation. 'Journey' quite literally describes the image on the tarot card, Six of Swords: a mother and child ferried by a boatman. The card, traditionally associated with transition, overcoming hardship and moving forward, is an apt emblem for the season of life that Kwa chronicles in this collection with such bare but gentle honesty, and with such purposefully simple and direct diction. "Truth is not promise / but compass", the poem declares. As old age, sickness and finally death have reversed the roles of mother and child ("I've become the mother you yearn for" the speaker states in 'Oceans, Unknowing'), the speaker accepts her own past and that of her mother, and leads them both towards an unknown future, buoyed by the hope that she is finally headed in the right direction.

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