Lau elects to celebrate those with whom she shares (or shared) space on this post-ghost planet, an admirable goal at the best of times; however, almost all of the poems' speakers suffer the slings and sorrows of enervation and ennui to a near-unbearable degree. Each adds to the growing heap of the fallen; and every last one takes up residence in the pages of Living Under Plastic, redolent with the luminous recollection of Arthur Miller's ever-growing mountain of skulls, once a novelty, now reduced by the near-vacuity of the regrettably weak narrators to little more than mere banality. From Landlocked:
… You would be amazed at how empty
some women feel, how some days
we walk around like glass vessels
with a blizzard of nothing inside us.
I buy lipsticks and lotions,
search for a silk thread
to lead me out of the labyrinth –
I want to spiral out of the earthbound past,
to drift along in the blue and buoyant air …
On the one hand, poetry aims to ease the anguish of the actual even as it fingers those wounds incapable of healing. Blindness, Tarantula and The Drowning, the trinity that comprises Living Under Plastic, will, by virtue of its rhetorical pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, alongside its transparent consonance, leave careful readers both superficially comforted and deeply disturbed. On the other hand, poets – sentinels of the sensorium – ought to stand at the ready, nimbly translating the universe by releasing words into the void in a steady enterprise that subverts definition.
Readers expecting illuminating insights into la condition humaine might wish to seek elsewhere for such lofty sentiments (or, for that matter, technical excellence); spare and dignified threnodies notwithstanding, Living Under Plastic rarely rises to the poetic occasion, perhaps because its creator pays little more than lip service to precision and originality in a collection that all too often collapses beneath the weight of its precious pondering of imponderabilities, through questionable strategies in the act of mourning the irrevocable.
A Poetry Fellow of the Chalmers Arts Foundation, contributing reviewer and In Other Words blogger, Judith Fitzgerald lives in Northern Ontario’s Almaguin Highlands. She is working on her 30th volume, a poetry collection slated for release … eventually.
