{"id":2339,"date":"2020-09-01T10:58:56","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T10:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2339"},"modified":"2020-09-01T11:06:27","modified_gmt":"2020-09-01T11:06:27","slug":"mary-jean-chan-fleche-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2339","title":{"rendered":"Mary Jean Chan, Fleche – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mary Jean Chan\u2019s Fl\u00e8che<\/em> describes the speaker\u2019s struggle to assert her gay sexual orientation despite social prejudice and her mother\u2019s horror. This story is interwoven with themes of cultural change and intercultural migration as the poet travels from Hong Kong to America and England. The whole book is framed by metaphors drawn from the sport of fencing \u2013 fl\u00e8che<\/em> itself and the section titles \u2018Parry\u2019, \u2018Riposte\u2019 and \u2018Corps-\u00e0-Corps\u2019. A more deeply imagined inner structure lies in a series of accounts of eating, drinking and cooking that runs through it, and particularly in an implicit parallel between Chan\u2019s gnawing erotic need and the constant hunger felt by her mother as a result of youthful starvation. This too ties in with the title, since fl\u00e8che<\/em> is pronounced \u2018flesh\u2019.<\/p>\n

Chan\u2019s formally ambitious, experimental and inventive writing does justice to her rich material. Risk is inherent in experimentation, of course, and her success varies; sometimes her expression seems luminously effective, at others less certain. However, given its context in the speaker\u2019s ongoing struggle of self-definition, uncertainty itself has expressive power: it acts out her effort, and keeps us alert as readers.<\/p>\n

Although each poem makes its own impact, they come fully into their own when the book is read as a single story. Event leads into event, poem into poem, discovery into discovery, and every state is provisional. Family, sex, culture – now one now another strand seems uppermost at different points but they\u2019re always interwoven. The resolutions they achieve are precarious in a way that makes them open-eyed and convincing.\u00a0 The tender and lovely \u2018Tea Ceremony\u2019, presenting harmony between mother and daughter and between Chinese and Western cultures, begins bracingly, \u2018There are days when I pretend \/ to understand my mother\u2019s grief\u2019. \u2018At the Castro\u2019 describes the joyous shock of stepping into a gay bar for the first time and feeling the thrill of acceptance there. This is beautifully done, but the poem is subtitled \u2018for Orlando<\/em>\u2019 and ends with thoughts about the homophobic massacre in a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016. The love between the poet and her partner is lyrically evoked in \u2018Safe Space III\u2019 and suggested in a narrative way in the glance of understanding they exchange in \u2018The Importance of Tea\u2019 but has \u00a0its own difficulties. Two of the most haunting lines in the book are \u2018the abiding terror \/ of the world\u2019s light\u2019. Fl\u00e8che<\/em> as a whole seems to say that to be alive is to be vulnerable but that courage allows one to snatch beauty from terror. In this way, the fencing metaphors have their own deep appropriateness.<\/p>\n

Mary Jean Chan, Fl\u00e8che<\/em>, 88pp, \u00a310.99, Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74 \u2013 77 Great Russell St, London WC1B 3DA<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Ann and Peter Sansom and Suzannah Evans for permission to post this extract from my review of books by Katrina Porteous, Mimi Khalvati, Mary Jean Chan and Hugo Williams in issue 64 of The North.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Jean Chan\u2019s Fl\u00e8che describes the speaker\u2019s struggle to assert her gay sexual orientation despite social prejudice and her mother\u2019s horror. This story is interwoven with themes of cultural change and intercultural migration as the poet travels from Hong Kong to America and England. The whole book is framed by metaphors drawn from the sport […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mary-jean-chan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2339"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2343,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions\/2343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}