from the editor's desk
Review of Who Comes Calling? by Miriam Wei Wei Lo
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. Who Comes Calling? WA Poets Publishing, 2023. RRP: $25.00, 90pp, ISBN: 9780645517859.
Jackson
Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s first collection, Against Certain Capture (2004), examined the lives of Lo’s Chinese and Australian grandmothers. Her second, Who Comes Calling?, is about her own story. Lo told me that ‘the poems in this collection are all very much autobiographical’. She wrote much of this poetry in ‘furtive’ moments during years of full-time unpaid work for her household (vii) and church (40). It appears she had to wait until her children were grown to have time to publish this book. Its quality is such that I can’t help wondering what she might have written if she’d had more support.
Given Lo’s background, it is not surprising that many of the poems express tensions between differing identities: Chinese and Australian, yes, but more centrally, homemaker and writer. ‘This worn grey carpet, toys all over the floor / reminding me that I have left the life of the mind / for this’ (20). The title poem foregrounds this tension:
I did not want poems. What good did a poem ever do me? How
will poetry feed my children? Satisfy my parents? What kind of
work is this?
I am a housewife, I muttered, and shut the door in its face. It kept
knocking. […] (51)
For Judith Huang, these poems express other identity conflicts: pastor’s wife versus artist and Christian versus poet. However, the attitude allowing Lo to make and share her art appears to arise from Christian experience. When Lo is invited to read at the Moon Café, whose ambience represents ‘everything about poetry / that I never was’, it is Jesus, surprising her from a portrait on the wall, who miraculously (‘Remember me? I turn water into wine’) enables her to express herself through poetry (32–33). ‘I take God’s hand,’ she writes. ‘I can feel / the nail holes’ (57).
Some of the poems use metaphor to explore the nature of God and human relationships with the Divine. ‘Prayer’ (quoted here in full) illustrates this:
I throw up a grappling hook
into the air above my head.
It catches and holds.
I start to climb,
trusting
you’ll catch me
if I fall. (41)
Another theme is a search for home, not only literal—‘a tent for the body / on this earth’ with ‘running water, six sets of taps, a fridge, a washing machine’ (20)—but also spiritual and cultural:
No children are raped there.
No one eats while others go hungry.
No lying awake, wondering which woman or child
in what sweatshop has made these pyjamas I wear,
or the sheets on the bed, or the rug on the floor.
I will not have to lock the door. (‘One Day I Will Find It’, 18)
Although this collection expresses sorrow at family violence and institutional child abuse and hints at an episode of deep psychological struggle, it is surprising that the poems do not significantly explore the tedium and relentless toil of the ‘holy estate / of marriage and motherhood’ (32), which are acknowledged only briefly: ‘I was always / exhausted. Always asking [God] for patience / and sleep’ (28). Rather, they appear to wholeheartedly embrace this ‘estate’. In the title poem, it is not Lo but her husband, saying ‘This could be from God’, who finally lets in the poem that is ‘knocking’ at the door (51).
It is also surprising that these poems do not deconstruct what Huang calls their ‘retrograde assumption’ that the domestic support people enabling art by working ‘at the kitchen sink’ are always women—‘your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, your wife’—although the reader is, at least, exhorted to help: ‘start drying!’ (24–25). Not only that, but ‘She sings as she washes’ (25). Does she really? Many homemakers would probably say ‘No!’, and this collection does not consider that.
What it does do, however, is celebrate the strength of women’s spirits and bodies. In ‘No Epidural’, birth is described in terms of winning a sporting contest:
Like surfing a sixteen-metre wave—
the wall of pain rises to its roaring crest and I catch it,
keeping my feet, sliding down its face, all the way
to the shallows.
I ride all night.
[…]
Try that, boys.
I cradle my glistening prize. (26–27)
This book’s predominant style is quietly spoken unrhymed free verse (varied by some skilful rhyming forms, including a villanelle). I write ‘quietly spoken’ because, as Esther Ottaway notes, Lo is one of those ‘writers who use ordinary words with uncommon skill’. Where she ventures into striking figurative language, she does so strictly to serve the poem, never to show off: ‘Rain stammers down like bursts of praise / from a hesitant tongue’ (30).
Apart from the stammering, that could almost describe the entire collection. Who Comes Calling? is well worth reading and re-reading.
Works Cited
Huang, Judith. ‘Judith Huang Reviews Who Comes Calling? by Miriam Wei Wei Lo’, Mascara Literary Review, 19 September (2023). Sourced at: https://www.mascarareview.com/judith-huang-reviews-look-whos-calling-by-miriam-wei-wei-lo/.
Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. ‘Re: “Who Comes Calling?”—A Question’. Received by Jackson, 28 November (2023).
Ottaway, Esther. ‘A Series of Mirrors: Esther Ottaway reviews ‘Who Comes Calling?’ by Miriam Wei Wei Lo’, Rochford Street Review, 20 November (2023). Sourced at: https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2023/11/20/a-series-of-mirrors-esther-ottaway-reviews-who-comes-calling-by-miriam-wei-wei-lo/.
Writer, poet and editor Jackson was born in Cumbria, England, and lives in Australia and New Zealand. Jackson has published four full-length poetry collections, including A coat of ashes (Recent Work Press 2019) and The emptied bridge (Mulla Mulla Press 2019), plus work in many journals and anthologies, notably the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. Jackson’s awards include the Ros Spencer Poetry Prize. In 2018, they completed a PhD in Writing at Edith Cowan University, winning the University Research Medal and two other awards. Jackson taught English in China in 2018/2019. writerjackson.com
