Asian American boookstores are priceless -- precarious and brave. What Advanced Searches on Barnes & Noble.com will never yield, what the shelves of Borders can't be counted on to carry much less surrender -- the Asian American bookstore will have gathered and displayed for you, rows upon rows of just the things you might not want to miss. It's like having a literary personal shopper.
It was thanks to just one of these stores, Asian American Curriculum Project in downtown San Mateo, that I've come across Amy Uyematsu's poetry. The book I picked up, Stone Bow Prayer, is Uyematsu's third published collection, but my first encounter. It is lovely.
And I have to confess, I'm not really a poetry person. A lot of it goes over my head. And then there's... well, best to refrain from judgment.
But Uyematsu's words do what language can, at its most powerful: retool our tired assumptions that we know the world around us, that we have seen this image, heard this sound, felt this sensation before. Inside one of her poems, you inhabit a moment that was never yours, far more crisply than you've inhabited the last 18 hours of your day.
This is why I read. And why I am so glad people write.
Uyematsu's language has the deceptive simplicity of the exquisitely made. It goes down so easy, and is yet so breathtaking. Hopefully she won't mind if I quote a poem here. There was special spacing in this one, which I tried to keep, but it wouldn't stick. (Go buy the book.)
* * *
STORM
after hearing "Monochrome,"
by the Kodo drummers
At first we hear nothing
only the barest flicker
of wrists and sticks appears
Then a flutter of sound
coming closer together
until everyone hears
This delicate drizzle
pretending to lull us
its liquid drone
Slowly swells to a clatter
the hands moving now
in frenzied precision
So unforgiving
the staccato air
its godly clamor
Drilling the ear
then arms falling still
the silence
That comes after rain
and we never suspect
how much heaven needs us
* * *
I think I'll read just one each day, until I'm done.
Posted by erin at February 9, 2006 9:53 PM
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Thanks for sharing. There used to be a slamming APA bookstore in NYC, run by the AAWW, but they sold it off. There's nothing like walking into a physical space where words and poems live and breath. Amazon and Barnes and Noble have no soul.
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