Review | Ocean Vuong’s poetry – beautiful, piercing and precise – in Time is a Mother confronts a mosaic of suffering
- Infused with hopeful yearning for a life of fullness and joy, Vuong’s poems conjure dazzling imagery while resisting the simplicity of traditional verse
- A minefield is a place ‘where you will learn/to dance’; his speaker ‘remembered my life/ the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree./& I was free’
Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong, pub. Penguin Press
In Not Even, the poem from which Ocean Vuong’s astonishing new book takes its title, he begs his body to be “more than what I’ll pass through”. He longs for a reality in which a protracted experience with loss (the death of his mother, the end of his relationship, the precarious condition of his mental health against the sting of such traumas) will yield a person who is not broken beyond repair – a person who like the poem tersely concludes, is
“screaming
and enough”.
The weight of that hopeful yearning permeates this piercing collection of poetry, resulting in the most beautiful work Vuong has given us to date.
Time is a Mother is a collection of meditations on piecing the self together after it has been ravaged by heartache and despair, two forces made an inevitable part of the human experience by time, which is unsparing.