The Ink Cloud Reader<\/em> is prefaced by an anecdote which imagines a famous Fourth Century AD Chinese calligrapher as a student trying to \u2018read\u2019 the clouds of ink in the pond in which he\u2019s made to wash his brush. So the title suggests both the book\u2019s difficulty and its concern with finding meaning and creating beauty in the teeth of the world\u2019s 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\u2019s an impressively skilful, dazzlingly inventive and sometimes moving book that speaks strongly to the confusions of contemporary life.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The first poem, \u2018Cumulonimbus\u2019, develops from the idea that the calligrapher might \u2018read\u2019 cumulonimbus clouds in the inky pond. Moving easily in terms of syntax and metre, it\u2019s full of quiet redirections that make its tone and overall bearing elusive. It begins<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Halfway through my life Allusions both enrich this and set the reader\u2019s compass spinning. It crosses worlds in geography and time \u2013 Trecento Tuscany and modern Japan. Echoing the opening of Dante\u2019s Commedia<\/em>, the first line absorbs that work\u2019s epic, public resonance but in replacing Dante\u2019s \u2018our<\/em> life\u2019 with \u2018my<\/em> life\u2019 Fan steps back from the representative to the individual. The next two lines have an intimately personal air: the speaker\u2019s imagination seems to linger over a memory whose significance he doesn\u2019t 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 \u2018the linseed oil \/ soured the sky\u2019 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0 This gives the poem a less circumscribed suggestiveness than poetry of ready self-disclosure can have.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Many of the poems are experimental in form. \u2018Suddenly\u2019 starts with an epigraph from Elmore Leonard, \u2018Never use \u2018suddenly\u2019, the most over-used, least-needed word in fiction\u2019 and consists of a series of very short prose paragraphs all including the word \u2018suddenly\u2019. The following two-page spread, called \u2018Delphi\u2019, is made up of nine very thin columns, each beginning with an explosively capitalized \u2018IF\u2019 and consisting of a series of questions. Poem after poem, in fact, takes a radically different form. All Fan\u2019s formal inventions seemed to me to have a clear expressive value in relation to their poems\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u2018Ink Cloud Reader\u2019 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. \u2018Year of the Rat\u2019, for example, starts with a quotation from Frost\u2019s \u2018Birches\u2019 \u2013 \u2018Earth\u2019s the right place for love\u2019 \u2013 only to flee to<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n another middle-aged When the poem returns to Earth and to a birch tree (not in Frost\u2019s New England forest but in some urban setting with concrete steps) it does so via reflections drawing together Odysseus, Persephone, the poet\u2019s 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 \u2018an off-white image of eroded flesh and failure\u2019 with a final italicised quotation from Frost\u2019s poem, \u2018I don\u2019t know where it\u2019s likely to go better<\/em>\u2019.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The penultimate poem, \u2018Epidaurus\u2019, is similarly allusive. Epidaurus itself is the site of a famous ancient Greek theatre and of the temple of the healer god Asclepius.\u00a0 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 \u2018lost people of \/ Yemen and Rakhine\u2019 bring to mind the \u2018Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii\u2019 of Derek Mahon\u2019s \u2018A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford\u2019. However, against the bleakness of \u2018Year of the Rat\u2019, \u2018Epidaurus\u2019 embraces transience in a spirit of desperate, determined affirmation, clashing images of beauty against those of destruction and atrocity:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n as if the sun, the sight of sea squills, the scent of pine, wild sage and oregano 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 \u2018all the Odysseuses yet to be translated \/ arguing with himselves\u2019 (sic).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Kit Fan<\/strong>, The Ink Cloud Reader<\/em>, 96pp, \u00a312.99, Carcanet Poetry, 2023<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n 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.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 The Ink Cloud Reader is prefaced by an anecdote which imagines a famous Fourth Century AD Chinese calligrapher as a student trying to \u2018read\u2019 the clouds of ink in the pond in which he\u2019s made to wash his brush. So the title suggests both the book\u2019s difficulty and its concern with finding meaning and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[205],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kit-fan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788"}],"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=2788"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2795,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2788\/revisions\/2795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
the reeds by Meguro River
where the ducks made love
stop whistling. I fear I\u2019ve over-
inked, or the linseed oil
soured the sky. The wind
tastes of oysters grilled
over autumn soil.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
galaxy \u2013 rocky, aqueous, Earth-sized
but not Earth-bound \u2013 where indigo flamingos
make alpine nests the shape of globe artichokes<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
alone could heal
our first and last loves, the shattered ice, burning hills, lost people of
Yemen and Rakhine \u2013
but I\u2019m wading in, catching the spring water with my mouth,
and taking my share of every single moment.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n