By Ally Chua

Review of Lydia Kwa’s from time to new (Canada: Gordon Hill Press, September, 2024)

Lydia Kwa’s new poetry collection from time to new is a time machine; it takes us through recollections of years gone by reconciled with current introspections. The collection starts with an epigraph from a poem in Mary Jean Chan’s book Flèche: “I left half of my language behind to escape my impeccable persona” (‘A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far’). This epigraph invites us to consider how language constructs ideals of being ‘impeccable’ and how leaving a place is a form of physical and social release.

Born in Singapore, Kwa moved to Canada over 40 years ago to study psychology and has stayed there since then, settling in Vancouver where she now works as a therapist and writes in her spare time. Author of five novels, two books of poetry, and two editions of a chapbook, from time to new is her third full poetry collection. Kwa’s past poetry works include both page poems as well as experimental poems. The Colours of Heroines and Sinuous contain vignettes shaped by Kwa’s contemplation on topics like growing up in Singapore, her transnational journey, and brushes with colonialism; but she also experiments with poetry in the form of mixed-media visual poems. In this aspect we can see Kwa’s trademark as a poet – the blending of the personal with the experimental, which is also reflected in this new collection.

from time to new is divided into three sections. At first, the first section, ‘distant shores’, seems to negotiate Kwa’s memories of Singapore when she was younger. Then, we realize that even while she is talking about digging for clams and reminiscing about tofu (“My childhood love, / I confess to lapses / In my devotion, too easily / Waylaid by glittery gourmands”), her parents are involved in many of these recollections. Indeed, ‘distant shores’ is about family, filtered through the lens of time. In ‘My Father Sold Pineapples’, Kwa describes how her father was forced to eat his unsold pineapples on an empty stomach during the Japanese Occupation, his fear and hunger creating a persistent “hollow” in him. More prominent in Kwa’s recollections, however, is her mother. In ‘Oceans, Unknowing’, Kwa lays bare a tumultuous matriarchal relationship where mother-daughter roles are reversed: “I’ve / become the mother you yearn for. I will never succeed in disappearing / that wound, no matter how hard I try.”

The familial thread is particularly apparent in ‘Eat Bitterness 吃苦’, a recollection about how Kwa’s mother once ran away from home, leaving Kwa to plead with her to come home. As Kwa recalls this memory, she asks

“Why did you return—was it
duty, love, or helplessness?
This afternoon, I am making soup
and thinking of your sacrifice”

Additionally, the ocean and the coastal shoreline are motifs often reiterated in this section. In ‘Digging for Clams’, Kwa describes her experience along the shore:

“at five, you approach shoreline as
a salty breeze on your lips
feel of hot sand
between toes”
Kwa then calls back to this memory in the next poem ‘Shoreline’:
“it’s hard to remember where
the original shoreline was
(where once, a child dug for clams)”

Kwa uses the ocean to represent not just a passage between continents, but across times, and perhaps, across planes of existence as well. ‘In-Between’ starts as a recollection of a friendship but also acknowledges the liminal space between life and death.

Using a passage of water to denote the boundary between life and death is not an unusual one – examples include the river Styx in the Greek underworld, Meng Po and the Naihe Bridge in the Chinese Huangquan, and waters in other folklore about afterlives. But Kwa imbues this watery motif with a Singaporean flourish as she focuses on our ever-expanding shorelines, a distinctive mark of Singapore’s land reclamation. More importantly, while Kwa is describing a passage between existences, she is also describing a passage between times, as Kwa’s memories describe the past and a bygone Singapore that she will not see again.

This reckoning with life, time, and death – and the sudden recollection of youthful memories –

becomes relevant when we segue into the main section of this collection, ‘mixed ethers’. ‘mixed ethers’ consists of two long poems, “Notes on Grieving 輓歌’, which was written about Kwa’s mother’s battle with cancer and her passing; and ‘Flight from Memory’, Kwa’s own diagnosis of breast cancer nine months after her mother passed.

In ‘Notes on Grieving 輓歌’, Kwa describes, in quiet, concise vignettes, her experience with her mother’s death. Through these vignettes, Kwa takes us through her experience of not just caring for a dying mother, but also the routines associated with the funerary process, and then finally, most emotionally, the grieving process alone thereafter.

Unlike the section earlier, Kwa’s writing here is straightforward and sparse. One pictures a grieving person spent, wanting to put memories on page but not having the energy for stylistic poetic flourishes. The sparse language also directs our attention to the narrative that Kwa is sharing, such as how Kwa spent hours by her dying mother’s side – but in the fifteen minutes Kwa took for a quick nap, her mother passed on, staying “true to her habit / of escaping scrutiny”. At one point in the poem, Kwa also shares that “my notes / an unspooling of energy / toward strangers / in a wish to transform / pain”, signifying that this poem is perhaps also a form of cathartic release for her.

The second long poem, ‘Flight from Memory’ takes a scientific rather than personal tone at first as Kwa negotiates her own cancer diagnosis. It is interesting to note here how Kwa writes about her experience – detachedly, from an outsider’s perspective, as if her cells are foreign invaders disrupting the smooth running of her body’s normal processes:

“… fresh scar under the right armpit
testifies to
a minefield of deadened nerves”

Kwa also interrogates the notion of ‘choice’:

“do cells harmonize
deconstruct
or self-destruct
do they have choice”

Given her mother’s passing, her own diagnosis, as well as the detached tone her poem has taken, this speaks of a larger rumination of whether one has control over one’s own body, or whether cells may choose to mutiny against the broader wishes of the self. Later, the poem veers back into the introspective, but the question of control remains, such as in this paragraph, which carries a slight hint of body horror:

I read that
children wear wings in a Taiyuan school
in Shanxi province
to maintain social distancing
*
we are beginning to mutate
can you feel it?

In the Acknowledgements page at the end of this book, Kwa shares that this collection was born from these two poems; other poems grew from this central bud. With this information, we can understand that Kwa’s collection came about because of her close brushes with death; we understand why Kwa revisited her childhood memories in the earlier section of the book; why she has poems dedicated to friends and creative/spiritual influences; why she often alludes to the passage of time, past and future.

The third section ‘from time to new’, carries itself lighter. We find poems dedicated to food, from laksa to chicken rice (echoing the ode to tofu in the first section). Despite moving to Canada forty years ago, there aren’t mentions of Canadian dishes here. This suggests that the use of Singaporean food is a metaphor for fond memories from Kwa’s past, especially since many of these dishes are from her childhood and perhaps an ode to her mother.

If there is a weak point in this book, it would be that a tighter focus may have served it better. There are poems centered around the chaos of the pandemic in early 2020. ‘A Lidded Jar’ starts as an exploration of tangible reality versus virtual reality, using it as a metaphor for the ‘online life’ many of us experienced when we sheltered in place during the pandemic. It delves into the imperfections of this period as well, the lidded jar as a metaphor for the eruption of violence, pressure and fault lines after fear and confinement. ‘Sniffing Butts’ is a light-hearted poem where Kwa mentions there’s no more “kissing ass” for her. Against the larger themes of this collection, they feel a little dissonant.

One observation is that many of Kwa’s poems have a sci-fi tinge to them. This is not surprising, given that Kwa is a novelist who has written works in the speculative fiction genre. The use of a sci-fi lens also lends to the emotional and linguistic detachment Kwa prefers in several of her poems. In ‘Future Enterprise’, for instance, Kwa flexes her worldbuilding prowess in an impersonal short prose poem about a futuristic vending booth that provides customers with the simulated reality of their choosing: “Olfactory stimulation awakens flavours of / favourite meals in restaurants, unhampered by health risks. Ignorance / is bliss.”

The speculative can be seen most prominently in ‘Magnetic Resonance’, where Kwa describes her experience in an MRI machine. Going beyond detachment, Kwa imagines herself as a ghost in the machine, traveling beyond the physical realm to other dimensions. This is very similar to the narrative she has in her earlier poem ‘In Between’, where she describes a dream of a deceased friend in a “nowhere space”.

In the earlier part of her collection, Kwa touches on planes of existence and even the spectral, such as in the abovementioned ‘In Between’. It is interesting to note how smoothly these earlier poems blend with the latter speculative (with futuristic simulated realities) poems. Between the spectral meals of ‘Future Enterprise’ to the “ghost” self of ‘Magnetic Resonance’, it’s clear that both concepts subscribe to the idea that the physical realm does not matter.

There are many themes explored over this collection, but it is Kwa’s mom who remains the emotional core as she returns as a subject over and over as Kwa negotiates her grief. This reviewer finds that these lines from ‘Block 17’ succinctly sum up the heart of this collection:

“six years of her absence
a whole lifetime left behind
the breeze swirls
around my body of difference”

The first two lines suggest a multitude of memories (“a whole lifetime left behind”) created by permanent loss. Yet at the same time, grief is not the only dimension being explored. The sonics of the phrase “the breeze swirls” suggest a lightness, a newness. Additionally, given that the two central poems in this collection were about Kwa’s brushes with cancer, the usage of “my body” in the line “my body of difference” hits hard. The phrase suggests a new beginning not just externally, but with the disease within as well.

from time to new concludes with the poem ‘& Found’, where Kwa imagines her mom’s reactions to Kwa’s Canadian home and neighborhood; the “neon cross” on top of the church, the “community garden” and even the “dust[iness]” of Kwa’s home. It is clear that Kwa knows her mother inside and out; such that even though she has passed, Kwa has no problem predicting her mother’s reactions. This interaction casts Kwa’s mother as an ongoing presence, bringing her into the present with Kwa, instead of relegating Kwa’s mom to the past.

Kwa’s act of mediumship in '& found’ befits its last lines: “Mummy, the memories fade / but here / you&I together.” This collection is ultimately a loving, living memory of Kwa’s mother.

Ally Chua is a Singaporean writer now based in Boston. She was the 2019 Singapore Unbound Fellow for New York City and has been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cordite Poetry Review, and Salamander Magazine. She is the author of poetry collection Acts of Self Consumption (2023) by Australian press Recent Work Press, and novel The Disappearance of Patrick Zhou (2023) by Singapore press Epigram Books.