Customer Reviews

This Isn't a Picture I'm Holding: Kuan Yin (Intersections)

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Kathy Phillips, This Isn't a Picture I'm Holding: Kuan Yin (University of Hawai'i, 2004)

"[Kuan Yin] teaches me a model of kindness and humor in an immediate community, as well as an ideal of activism against social injustice in a bigger community", Kathy Phillips writes in her introduction to This Isn't a Picture I'm Holding. And has she kept to the first half of that sentence, this book would probably have found its way onto the same shelf that holds the best of Lyn Lifshin's Madonna books and Todd Moore's Dillinger pieces. For Phillips' book is structured along the same vein-- a large number of poems that focus on one subject, examining different aspects or attributes of that subject.

When Phillips is good, these are excellent pieces, and much of the book's first half is comprised of these poems-- amusing snapshots of the imagined life of Kuan Yin in one of her many incarnations:

"Only Kannon

would know to love jellyfish.

They lay in the sand,

pulses of blue

in clear veins.

The jellyfish drove

never wanted to beach!

They strove to be

restrained,

but were driven

by squalls,

by tsumani

of love...."

(--"Jellyfish")

Simple, clear images, clever turns of wit, perhaps an over-reliance on alliteration that can get annoying when three alliterations immediately follow one another in the space of two lines, but that's forgivable if it only happens once or twice. Then, however, comes the second half of the book, and the second half of the sentence I quoted at the beginning of this review. Everything goes downhill from there. To be fair, there are a scattering of good social-activism poems here-- which is better than I've seen in most poetry books that attempt this incredibly difficult form of poetry-- but compared to the number of social activism poems here, there are a lot of swine to dig through looking for the pearls.

"To please a Buddha, leave,

hurry on, pick up your

banner, hand-painted, pied red,

reading, 'Make Methanol, Not War',

as the expensive machine

bulldozes boys in the Gulf

over oil,

and the tiger-claw blossoms

drop underfoot

at the protest march."

(--"To Please a Buddha")

Do you see the difference? The simplest way I can put it is this-- the first passage above is presenting itself, and any emotions that enter into the mix are those you bring to the table yourself. The second leaves you no room to bring anything to the table-- the author is demanding you feel a certain way about the material. It's not just in the choice of subject matter, and how that subject matter is presented (although needing to flog the long-dead "oh, this is about oil" silliness doesn't help matters much), it's in the very choice of words. There's no room in the lean, exceptional first piece for such value-judgment words as "expensive". But, as almost always happens with protest poetry, the author simply doesn't trust the reader to come up with the right way to feel about the subject matter, and thus the author ends up doing all your feeling for you. Do you get why that's a bad thing? Would that more poets did. **

in and out of the recesses and corners from Long Drugs to temples in the valleys, in the hands of a Bamboo Ridge poet tender, surreal, and caustically cautionary by turns and twists of language and modest feats of imagination and compassion. A welcome addition to the Dharma Bum quests as these visionary longings hit the waters and contexts of Bamboo Ridge and Asia/Pacific in the hands of a Kuan Yin devotee and splendid scholar-poet of Hawai'i and the everyday world. A world where, like Benjamin, the poet is "a theologian marooned in the realms of the profane" and a shopping mall reality.