The Ink Cloud Reader is prefaced by an anecdote which imagines a famous Fourth Century AD Chinese calligrapher as a student trying to ‘read’ the clouds of ink in the pond in which he’s made to wash his brush. So the title suggests both the book’s difficulty and its concern with finding meaning and creating beauty in the teeth of the world’s confusion and violence and the inevitability of death. Difficulty comes both from its forms and the nature of its content: straddling public and private experience, it presents both in fragmentary terms and the latter in oblique and reticent ones as well. For the right reader it’s an impressively skilful, dazzlingly inventive and sometimes moving book that speaks strongly to the confusions of contemporary life.

The first poem, ‘Cumulonimbus’, develops from the idea that the calligrapher might ‘read’ cumulonimbus clouds in the inky pond. Moving easily in terms of syntax and metre, it’s full of quiet redirections that make its tone and overall bearing elusive. It begins

Halfway through my life
the reeds by Meguro River
where the ducks made love
stop whistling. I fear I’ve over-
inked, or the linseed oil
soured the sky. The wind
tastes of oysters grilled
over autumn soil.

Allusions both enrich this and set the reader’s compass spinning. It crosses worlds in geography and time – Trecento Tuscany and modern Japan. Echoing the opening of Dante’s Commedia, the first line absorbs that work’s epic, public resonance but in replacing Dante’s ‘our life’ with ‘my life’ Fan steps back from the representative to the individual. The next two lines have an intimately personal air: the speaker’s imagination seems to linger over a memory whose significance he doesn’t share. References to over-inking and linseed oil link back to the calligraphy school of the preface and suggest the idea of the poet worrying about the success of his compositions. Metaphor becomes abstract, even surreal in ‘the linseed oil / soured the sky’ but the following lines bring a breeze of sensuous immediacy. Oblique and elliptical as this is, I think it works beautifully, partly because the phrasing is so precisely evocative, partly because the poet’s reticence invites the reader to collaborate in the imagining of scenarios and the creation of meanings more than he or she would if the poet gave more definite or consistent guidance.  This gives the poem a less circumscribed suggestiveness than poetry of ready self-disclosure can have.

Many of the poems are experimental in form. ‘Suddenly’ starts with an epigraph from Elmore Leonard, ‘Never use ‘suddenly’, the most over-used, least-needed word in fiction’ and consists of a series of very short prose paragraphs all including the word ‘suddenly’. The following two-page spread, called ‘Delphi’, is made up of nine very thin columns, each beginning with an explosively capitalized ‘IF’ and consisting of a series of questions. Poem after poem, in fact, takes a radically different form. All Fan’s formal inventions seemed to me to have a clear expressive value in relation to their poems’ particular material. However, what I personally most enjoyed was the way lines of lyrical simplicity and poignancy were highlighted and gained depth of meaning by suddenly emerging from the perplexed matrix surrounding them. 

‘Ink Cloud Reader’ gains depth and imaginative reach from the way many of its poems are saturated in allusions to literature from different cultures, moving kaleidoscopically between them and the different places in which the author has lived in fact or in mind. ‘Year of the Rat’, for example, starts with a quotation from Frost’s ‘Birches’ – ‘Earth’s the right place for love’ – only to flee to

another middle-aged
galaxy – rocky, aqueous, Earth-sized
but not Earth-bound – where indigo flamingos
make alpine nests the shape of globe artichokes

When the poem returns to Earth and to a birch tree (not in Frost’s New England forest but in some urban setting with concrete steps) it does so via reflections drawing together Odysseus, Persephone, the poet’s partner, Japanese knotweed and sakura (cherry blossom, celebrated in Japan as symbolising hope on the one hand, transience on the other). The end note bleakly juxtaposes reference to ‘an off-white image of eroded flesh and failure’ with a final italicised quotation from Frost’s poem, ‘I don’t know where it’s likely to go better’.

The penultimate poem, ‘Epidaurus’, is similarly allusive. Epidaurus itself is the site of a famous ancient Greek theatre and of the temple of the healer god Asclepius.  Connecting the classical Greek world and that of the Chinese calligrapher, the poet imagines ink flooding through the sockets of his eyes while he waits for Asclepius. The ‘lost people of / Yemen and Rakhine’ bring to mind the ‘Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii’ of Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’. However, against the bleakness of ‘Year of the Rat’, ‘Epidaurus’ embraces transience in a spirit of desperate, determined affirmation, clashing images of beauty against those of destruction and atrocity:

as if the sun, the sight of sea squills, the scent of pine, wild sage and oregano
alone could heal
our first and last loves, the shattered ice, burning hills, lost people of
Yemen and Rakhine –
but I’m wading in, catching the spring water with my mouth,
and taking my share of every single moment.

The strenuousness with which this poem moves between high-cultural allusions and simple lyricism is itself a moving reflection of divisions within this Hong Kong born poet who in this poem dreams of himself as playing ‘all the Odysseuses yet to be translated / arguing with himselves’ (sic).

Kit Fan, The Ink Cloud Reader, 96pp, £12.99, Carcanet Poetry, 2023

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom and Holly Hopkins for their permission to post this review, which appeared in the North issue 70.