Water Puppets
BY Quan Barry
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)

Quan Barry’s first two volumes of poetry, Asylym (2001) and Controvertibles (2006), are unique and lyrical, tipping their edges into the sun to pull up dazzling images. The lines are long and spidery, compounding to a breathtaking finish. Though the earlier collections did not shy away from the political, Barry’s latest collection, Water Puppets, makes new that long-lined form, investing more in the narrative and sources of repetition to reflect gut betrayals of language and land.

These poems create a larger sequence in the poetry of witness, where the speaker examines her own place within contemporary moments that include devastating wars in places that do not always claim ownership of the front page. The sites Barry sinks into are ones that lead to lines such as, “When we speak of you / we say the place we left behind, / when we speak of you we say / eventually” (p. 20). These are places of forgetting and profound neglect.

Made from lacquered wood, water puppets originated in the eleventh century in the flooded rice fields of Northern Vietnam. It isn’t until the fifth prose piece titled “poem” that we enter the literal world of the water puppet, “the stage knee-deep and so blue it looks solid.” It is through this poem that she arrives at the closing lines:

We have already experienced a similar reality in a previous piece, also titled “poem,” which ends with the sentence, “Despite their monstrousness, they are unmistakably human; one with his intestines on the outside of his body floats sucking his thumb” (p. 57). These images are at once visceral and frank, meant to place the reader precisely in the scene she presents.

The sequence of poems titled “learning the tones” are a deep contrast to many of her other, heftier-limbed poems; these are compact series of four couplets, hovering around six syllables, six poems total, each named after the six Vietnamese vocal tones. These poems contain some of the most elegant language of the book:

from “[ngang]”: “It’s what just skims the earth. / Hope. Flower.
Afternoon. Ghost.”
from “[sac]”: “the moon / with its long bright ears”
from “[huyen]”: “How like rain // even the sound of the word sad /
slides down the face.”
from “[hoi]”: “This is the most difficult sound of all. / This is
the sound of begging.”
from “[nang]”: “”beautiful things also come from below— /
rice seedlings, music, wine, // & yet we suffer”

It is within these poems where the poet poses the question: “Who would I be if I stayed?” Here we begin to understand the personal investment in the cultural and individually human ramifications of war. In Barry’s first “poem,” she writes, “this child of the enemy who stayed and made a life for himself in a country where people say such children were born from mud” (p. 55). Much later in the book, Barry writes in the poem “history,” “how did I end up here what was I search for alabaster skin like a dinner plate” (p. 61). These concerns are compounded — history, regret, belonging.

Take the long poem “reportage,” which works its way through five pages in quintains. She explores the job of the reporter observing the Congolese landscape in lines that remain without punctuation and switch from fragment to regenerated sentence in the same breath. The poem’s repetition balances between the systematic and an echoing monkish chant, a solemn song of reminder, a narrative that progresses and folds back on itself. Five stanzas in, Barry writes, “this is the journalist’s mission to carry the thing / back to us how the word derives from the Latin / for “gate” or “door” here the story he wants” (p. 11). Her urgency is in finding the language to reflect experience — her mission to not only find the words for gate or door, but to find those objects themselves, bring them to the reader, and find meaning within. The poem later confesses, “this isn’t a story of hope but rather of dormancy” (p. 13), the concept of which echoes throughout the collection.

Barry spends time in France and writes of it in the sprawling sixteen-page poem “meditations” at the center of the book that builds on the deeply penetrating topic of regret. Here we have a poem that contains citations as poetic line, and opens with two images on either side of the globe: the peaceful protestor at the side of a winter road in America and “In northwestern China / … a light-eyed woman yelling in the street” (p. 31). These two situations are slender, entwined glimpses in the lives of these passionate people, though neither message is revealed — yet. Barry moves to describe, “There are places on the human body that will not heal / due to their constantly being in motion.” This poem is full of that kind of worrying, the thumb on the wound trenchant and relentless — full of admissions, such as the description of the bombings of Afghan wedding parties with the speaker’s confession, “Either way I am always relieved / when I hear the bridge and groom are among the dead” (p. 35). Her urgency is in finding the language to reflect experience — her mission to not only find the words for gate or door, but to find those objects themselves, bring them to the reader, and find meaning within. Two pages later, she is asked “what I find most shocking about my seven months here,” and when she lists trivial things, she is chastened: “The someone gives a long speech, // the gist of which is that when someone asks you a serious question / you should give a serious answer” (p. 37). But this poem is full of serious answers: in a supermarket, she spots women in burkas and writes, “I admit I thought / a lot of ungenerous things. … // To refuse to imagine myself / choosing to live like that” (p. 38). By refusing herself the experience of shifting experience, the poet has, in fact, done so, becoming indignant: “Soon [France] will outlaw / a woman’s right to hide herself form head to toe” (p. 42). The sense of self within this poem and others is honest and haunted. The poem returns to the opening images, revealing a cardboard sign asking for “Peace” and “the woman with the light eyes just wants to know / where her husband and sons / have been taken” (p. 45). The poem does not stop there — we are returned to the devastating images of twin babies born after war, kept in formaldehyde in glass jars, but it is in those last four lines that give beauty to those battling contrasts: “In Mongolia there are singers / who can sing two notes at the same time. // One phrase deep and rich, ice moving downhill. The other / like birds flying. Like light dancing on a river” (p. 46).

Barry is referring to the practice of throat-singing, a kind of music that raises the hair on the listener’s arms. This, too, is the effect this unwavering collection has on the reader.