Hailing from Manila and residing in Vancouver, located in the territories of the Musquea, Squamis, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, Steffi Tad-y’s debut collection of poetry, From the Shoreline, draws on a number of reference points related to place, race, and experience. It was really refreshing to see poems dealing with “Instapoet” topics in an actually poetic way. Tad-y elevates the types of observations found elsewhere by providing them with that necessary specificity to create a meaningful experience, which is especially impressive since the collection is only about fifty pages long.
I was drawn in early in the collection. The second poem in the collection, “Gising,” begins as follows: “I can’t remember / if it was barbed wire // or bits of beerglass / the bougainvillea towered over, // or an orange boomerang / then a scar under my eye” (4). I appreciate the violence of the image and all the possibilities for scarring. Even bougainvillea, which appears beautiful, is a thorny plant. The end result is the same: a scar under the eye. The fact that the origin of that scar is not really specified or clear reinforces the everydayness of these types of traumas. The lines that follow seem to offer a challenge to the glorification of these moments: “One day, I want to retire / from seeing only spectacle” (4). There’s a hopefulness that follows and sets an optimistic tone for the collection. The narrator wants to “Live long enough / to grow with [her] hands. // Press one’s fingers into the dirt. / Gather beans. Make of it a warm bowl. // Feed my child. / Muscle a cramped road” (4). In the middle of the poem, there is a short phrase that shifts the tone to an appreciatory, almost incantatory style. Tad-y writes, “This is my signal” (4). The rest of the poem celebrates her grandfather with specific details: “in a bucket hat, bobbing to ‘Purple Rain’” (4). There’s then a blazon of particularities: “Sunflowers from Sxόtsaqel / spring out of his car window. // A Basset Hound says hello. / Earlier, my nephew had a thread // around his two milk teeth. / His mother by the door” (4). Then, she continues to appreciate other seemingly mundane moments: “In our language, to wake up / rhymes with blessing. // The sun is / beginning to line my irises. // My niece, how she sings / “Baby Shark.” // What else can I tell you? / Let us go. // There is side-street parking. / The ticket machine // looks like a pair of binoculars / across an orchid mural. // Keys & raincoat are on the table. / I have been late all this time” (5).
I’d like to comment on two echoes that I see in the work above. First, it’s hard not to hear an echo of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when you read “Let us go” in a poem. Rather than being crabs scuttling on the ocean floor, though, there are binoculars looking outward. There’s also something about the poem that reminds me of the work of Derek Walcott—indeed, much of the collection makes me think of his work. In this case, the image of binoculars appears in his poem “Prelude,” which is also a poem about missing time. The fact that this poem ends on “I have been late all this time” offers a counterpoint to Walcott’s “Prelude” where he seems to speeding through life and looking backward. In both cases, the force of the poem seems to live in its observational quality.
A number of poems have powerful closing lines that have a nearly aphoristic quality. In “Merienda,” Tad-y offers a precise and rich scene, and I’ll replicate the final three stanzas here:
We know what to do
when refined sugar starts
to scratch our throats.
Inside her house
we boil a kettle. Pour
mugs of oregano.
Silver door swings open.
We kill mosquitoes
that remind us we are meat. (36)
I appreciate the intimacy of the scene and the moment of boiling a kettle. Then, the final lines are a great reversal: “We kill mosquitoes / that remind us we are meat” (36). I like the phrasing of it and the ambiguity of it. Are they killing mosquitos because they remind them they are meat? Or is it the mere everydayness of it that matters? It’s also a nice juxtaposition of the human characters eating sugar and boiling a kettle and then they, too, are being consumed.
Tad-y’s poems often address broader issues. For now, I’m going to set aside the diasporic piece to focus on mental health. In the poem “For Us,” the speaker notes that “For us who think in constellation / instead of consequence. // Open – a word we fear / for what swerves. // What fills. // Once, in a psych ward, / I traced small dents on the wall // as if each showed the earth / from a single cell to a dying beloved. // We root as much as we can and yet” (25). Of course, there’s the explicit reference to a psych ward, but it also emulates the way that people may think divergently—those who think “in constellation.” That phrase is a delight, given the way that tenuous points are connected to form a broader picture. Similarly, tracing small dents on the wall gives another visual to supplement the constellation. Then, it goes into the cell metaphor (and the doubleness of biological cells and prison cells is probably worth noting here). I appreciate the final lines as being another form of constellation, a set of roots. The difficulty is that the poem ends on an incomplete thought: “We root as much as we can and yet.” It’s an uncomfortable incompleteness.
As I briefly alluded to, there’s a fair amount of diasporic discourse throughout the poems. In that respect, the poems often deal with language. In “Islands Along Mount Pleasant,” there’s a line that “you misheard flawed / as flowered and filled / what was missing / in the air with Yes / everywhere people flower” (46). I can literally hear that voice that says “flawed” for “flowered” and that notion that everyone is “flawed” being replaced with everyone flowering is a delight. Slightly later in the poem, the narrator writes that “We left an archipelago / whose elders weather / heart attack & heat stroke / as if illness / were a cluster of islands / we cross / so it crosses back” (46). The scene is beautiful and continues on to discuss how “Today is the fourth / day of spring / & we live / in a city that unroofs / as often as it rains” (46). The idea of a city unroofing is just gorgeous. Again, the poem ends on a great trio of lines: “Under a glass awning, / we trace patterns / on our palms” (46).
One poem, “English Lessons in a Former Colony,” offers a list of all the things that were not the ways English was taught:
Not cathedrals
or knuckles
outside its steel gates.
Not palms rushed
by need or else
pressed upwards
covering their children
with prayers
before the tricycles
& roosters.
Not classroom
letters as the law
& license plates
to shiny futures.
Not the Mayor
in a pineapple fiber
silver bulletproof
cruising,
“Do you know
who I am?”
or the robber
he ordered
to eat the stacks
of bills he stole.
not tetanus
straight into
the stomach.
Not the hand shy
& forgoing
what it thinks
in fear of how
it sounds.
Not nuns,
centipedes
or gym teachers
who move you.
Not is or are
drilled on blue red blue
until the chalk breaks
into a screech,
& elders tug
our ankles cold.
Not the whiz
of metal trays.
Furious spoons
& forks at lunch.
Not a hint
of cockroach on rice.
Not wrists
on desks like onions
on a chopping board.
Listens,
believing
it’s all in the mind. (31-32)
I think this poem is replete with an excellent set of images. I like the repetitive structures that guide the poem, as well. The pattern of “not / or” is fantastic, and the first image of knuckles wrapped around outside the cathedral gates is such a grim opening, especially given our colonial pasts. I also like the inversion of our normal ways of learning: “Not classroom / letters as the law // & license plates to shiny futures” (31). Learning from these common moments of language is explicitly denied as the way of learning in a colony. The layers of political corruption that go on in these contexts also gets a reference: “Not the Mayor // in a pineapple fiber / silver bulletproof / cruising, // “Do you know / who I am?” / or the robber / he ordered / to eat the stacks / of bills he stole” (31). These political parables do not serve any purpose to learn English—it’s great to see all of the ways in which nothing is learned. Instead, it’s “tetanus / straight into / the stomach.” All the figures of institutional institutions—nuns and gym teachers do nothing; the pests (centipedes, cockroaches) also do nothing. The different chalks breaking over verb conjugation point to the meaninglessness of the lesson on the speaker. The image of “wrists / on desks like onions / on a chopping board” (32) points to the violence inherent in education as well, and it strikes me as such a haunting resonance to stories of abuse in residential schools and beyond.
Collectively, the poems do a great job of exploring issues in a resonant way without relying on the basic tropes that have been deployed ad nauseam in other forms of poetry. It’s a good debut that offers compelling images and some moments of specific intimacy that really help the collection work. It’ll be great to see where Tad-y’s work goes next; there’s enough linguistic exploration here that I’m sure there are many poems left in Tad-y’s well.
Happy reading!
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