“To Live Is to Lose Everything”

By Genevieve Hartman

Review of Seas Move Away by Joanne Leow (Canada: Turnstone Press, 2022)

I grew up in southwestern New York, hours from the sea, but I lived without seeing the ocean for probably twelve years or more. We were—and are—lake people, just outside of the Finger Lakes region proper, and I spent many joyful hours by the lake, scrabbling for beach glass or swimming until the cold water stole all the warmth from my limbs. So, while I don’t have the same connection to the sea that Joanne Leow’s speaker does, I understand the kind of melancholic, reverent tone that emerges every time the waves crash through Seas Move Away. There is something both exhilarating and soothing about being by the water, which is dangerous and wild one day, and glassy calm the next. Although Leow’s book of poems Seas Move Away is neatly divided into sections with titles such as “All Submerged Lands,” “Shallow Water Effects,” and “Oscillations,” the book is as unpredictable as the ocean, moving between Singapore and Saskatchewan, recalling intimate moments on one page and critiquing laws the next. The water dredges up the personal and the political, and Leow addresses it all.

As an island nation, Singapore has an inescapable connection to the sea, and the speaker almost equates the two: Singapore is a part of the ocean, and the ocean is a part of Singapore. Toward the beginning of the book is a series of poems, “Eden: Gardens by the Bay, Singapore,” critiquing Singapore's most iconic gardens. Through the seven poems, the speaker traces the construction of the gardens, telling readers to “Begin in the sea / ask where this land came from,” then learn how the land was "improved" as salt water was dredged away to make space for the conservatory. After the completion of the project, the reader is walked through the tourist attraction, with "its simulacrum of long-lost streets," food courts, and “perpetual spring / in a land that has known only sea and monsoon.” In the closing poem, "Exit / Gift Shop" the speaker remarks: 

Love is
as much
as this artificial system

of mist and coolness
will allow

                        just so

These spare lines encapsulate the distaste that the speaker feels about the Gardens by the Bay and its unnatural climate. The artificial beauty of the gardens serves as an eye-catching backdrop for selfies, but it does not accurately represent Singapore. To the speaker, the Gardens by the Bay symbolizes a Singapore that has been sucked dry of its origins, the ocean. Rather than a manufactured environment, Singapore is made of waves and rock and bones and coral, with a “watery heart / all its old depositories/ its forgotten views.” To know the sea is to know Singapore and its origins.

As reflections on the experience of immigration and diaspora, Leow’s poems cling to their origins in the sea as a central and vital part of knowing and holding onto the self. The language of the ocean is frequently used to explore diasporic experience, as the speaker searches for a new home in an unfamiliar place, learns new cultural customs and new languages, and comes to terms with colonialist histories. Leow’s poem “Diaspora” portrays a scenario (or perhaps it should be called a parable) where the speaker tries unsuccessfully to rescue someone from inside a net, with only a small pair of cutters to assist them. The speaker says, “All I have left is to slip small / folded pieces of paper / through the mesh.” The messages on the notepaper are meant to buoy the captive’s emotions, since physical rescue proves impossible, but these notes are imperfect, “read in unconnected / fragments.” The person in the net is perhaps someone who has emigrated, whereas the would-be rescuer with the cutters is the person who remains, trying to help the captive hold on to the scraps of their past. The danger of the net seems to suggest that there is more to the prospect of immigration than meets the eye. The speaker continues,

I can only remind you
that I remember. That
I am trying for accuracy.
No, truth.

On this side, the net glitters.

The poem and its speaker reveal the hidden pain that comes after the glittering appeal of immigrating for new opportunities has faded: the loss of memory and tradition, parts of oneself, in the metaphorical and sometimes literal journey across the sea. Holding on to one’s origins as an immigrant proves challenging in the face of pressures to assimilate, and the pieces that remain are at risk of shrinking slowly, becoming garbled.

Seas Move Away presents a very specific experience of immigration, a Singaporean who moves to Saskatchewan, one of Canada’s two landlocked provinces. The move is difficult not just because immigration of any kind is difficult, but also because of the separation from the sea. In the poem “Canada,” the speaker bemoans the country that “punishes with frostbite” and cracks their skin. To mitigate their hardship and loss, the speaker is drawn to lakes and other bodies of water to fill the missing space that the ocean once inhabited in their heart. Just as the sea provides a sense of knowing Singapore, the bodies of water in Saskatchewan hold the same promise. In the poem “Lake,” the speaker asks,

do we know what histories are interred
in the enclosure of fields
the songs of birds
the sediment on the shores of this lake

There is a living memory held by the waters, and the speaker comes to seek it out, intent on learning about this new home. The poem hints at Canada’s colonial history, while also paying attention to the natural world and its held secrets, hoping to learn at the shores of the lake. Here is a way of reclaiming one’s origin and of putting down new roots.

Origin extends to more than just one’s cultural heritage, and Seas Move Away at times moves into familial territory, with several poems that recall the speaker’s memories of their mother and grandmother as their bodies progressively deteriorate. “Grandmother, an Inventory” is written from the aging grandmother’s perspective, beginning, “I’m already a dead person” and continuing to catalog all the things given away, from jewelry, to clothes, to sewing machine, to dignity. In “On Loss,” the speaker muses on the painful prospect of their mother losing fine motor skills in her hands, leaving her unable to write. Rather than facing that prospect, the speaker wants to dwell on their children learning to hone their own motor skills for the first time, the beginning instead of the end. The poem ends with the difficult realization that nothing can last: 

while we briefly rise above
our bodies and time, to live is to lose
Everything.

Although the poems do not specifically mention that these people have been left behind in Singapore, the implication is there. Even if one does not migrate, old age will eventually result in separation. Whether now or later, the people who have made us who we are will be left behind, and like the speaker, we will be left behind to cling to our wisps of origin and memory. 

There are so many moments that can be lost: to time, to death, to moving away, and to the sea, and Joanne Leow seems intent on crystallizing as many of these moments as possible through her poems, whose tones move between wistful and wondering and reverent. This book is in many ways a catalogue of losses, written “for those who move away,” as the book dedication has it. Preserved here are the varied challenges of migration, times with loved ones, feelings of rage and loneliness that readers are invited into. Leow tackles these harsh truths of life with frankness and acceptance. Her lines and images waste no space, creating a book that is gorgeously stark and achingly sad. The sea flows and crashes throughout the collection, always drawing the speaker back towards salt and silt and home, until we too are pulled out by the tide and knocked over, “breathless in the / foam.”

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Genevieve Hartman is a Korean-American poet and reviewer based in upstate New York. She is the Social Media and Outreach Coordinator for Adi Magazine and Art Editor for Gasher Journal. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, EcoTheo, River Mouth Review, and others. Find her at genahartman.com.

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