Miriam Wei Wei Lo is a Canadian-born, Fremantle-based poet of Chinese-Malaysian and Anglo-Australian descent who “writes because life is too short to let it pass without comment.” Her first collection, Against Certain Capture (Five Islands Press, 2004), was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for poetry. Her poems have since been published in newspapers, journals and anthologies.
Who Comes Calling? is Miriam’s latest and second collection and brings together work from the last 30 years. As she writes in the book’s introduction, poetry is “a way of figuring out who I am, a way to notice beauty, a way to process what’s happening, a way to keep things, a way to share things, and a way to play.”
The book is divided into four sections. In Crossing Over, the poems range from meditations on identity (“My three-year-old daughter is sad:/‘I am Chinese/but I can’t read Chinese.’” and place (“What could I say/in humid Singapore/the place where I lived/most of the time?”) to reflections on language and love.
In Juggling, the tension between experience and finding the words to fit it flickers and roars against a continuum of faith: “Even here there is doubt. Questions passing like shadows across the white face of the moon. What part of suffering comes from our own recklessness?”
Then, in Rearview Mirror’s solitary poem, In Memory of Katrina Miles, the enumerations and obsessive nature of grief and loss worked through like a borrowed book: “1. It takes me nearly five years to finish the book that you lent me because I cannot get past that first page which has your name and number on it (…)”
Finally, the poems in Hanging Around, some of which are ekphrastic/ecstatic after the digital drawings of Jenny Potts-Barr (beautifully reproduced in the book), bring us to an even more visceral immanence (if that’s not a tautology) where family, faith and freedom interact in a valedictory dance: “My mind leaps: a fish flipping over a weir, shattering the surface of the dam with the silver twist and flick of elation. The water opens its arms like a God who does not play favourites.”
Throughout, the poems are formally playful, whether free verse or prose poem, stanzaic or durchkomponiert, and while obvious rhyme and other traditional poetic techniques are generally eschewed, tone, texture and above all rhythm are savoured for their expressive potential.
There is however one witty use of rhyme which must be mentioned here, and which seems a fittingly playful way to end this review:
I pause a moment,
in reverence for all that is seen and unseen,
and then begin to squirt the Pine O Cleen.