A Hurry of English, Mary Jean Chan
ignitionpress, 2018 £5.00
Conflicted loyalties
Mary Jean Chan’s poems are well known since her debut collection Fléche won the 2019 Costa Poetry Prize. This pamphlet, its 2018 predecessor, contains a number of poems from that prize-winning collection. They explore the complex ‘coming-of-age’ of the poet.
The poems are personal to a point of self-exposure from which some writers might shy away. Chan does not hide the battles of realising her sexuality, nor the struggle this presents for her mother and wider family.
There’s a tremendous sense of responsibility towards the poet’s mother who has endured ‘those Red-Guarded days / and nightmares’ (mentioned in ‘Always’) and the mother-daughter relationship is a central focus of the collection.
The poet expresses the difficulty of reconciling a gay relationship with a parent who considers it a ‘[disgrace],’ as in the poem ‘//’. In this poem the two girls are described as ‘chopsticks: lovers with the same anatomies’. The mother uses Cantonese as a means by which ‘expletives detonate’ in front of the English partner who doesn’t understand the language
The poet’s emotional stress is raw and never entirely resolved. Chan introduces this idea with her opening poem, ‘Always’:
Mother, what do you think?
You are always where I begin.
The pamphlet is dedicated to Chan’s parents ‘who understand what poetry is for.’ Even in this dedication there seems to be a protectiveness, an understanding of the criticism they, too, could face. The poems that reveal the history of the mother’s life are helpful for giving context so that each individual can be viewed with compassion.
As a set, the poems have pleasing variety of form. The tone, however, is predominantly sad, not least because of the opposing pulls on the writer’s loyalty, as in ‘Notes Towards an Understanding’:
My mind was tuned to
two frequencies: mother’s Cantonese rage,
your soothing English, asking me to choose.