Mosquito and Ant. - book review

Progressive, The, Dec, 1999 by Joel Brouwer

Mosquito and Ant by Kimiko Hahn W.W. Norton & Co. 102 pages. $21.00 (cloth).

The title of Kimiko Hahn's new collection of poems refers to nu shu, a thousand-year-old secret script used by Chinese women for private correspondence. Hahn portrays the script as a kind of secret code for the feminine side of the gender wars, and many of the poems in Mosquito and Ant take the form of confidential letters to "L," a woman friend to whom the poet turns for counsel and comfort. Since the suggestion is that we are reading in these poems not just a private correspondence, but a coded one, we expect the correspondents will be totally candid, and the eavesdropper in us is aroused.

Hahn uses a number of traditional Asian poetic forms in Mosquito and Ant, such as zuihitsu, a Japanese form Hahn defines as "stray notes, expressing random thoughts in a casual manner," or "a free-flowing brush." "Sewing without Mother," the final, and best, poem in the book, is a long zuihitsu written to the author's sister. The poem works as a kind of diary, and though the entries are extremely diverse in subject and tone, they harmonize to create a rich meditation on motherhood. Whether Hahn is writing about her children, her study of literature, her identity as an Asian-American, her father, her friends, or her career as a teacher, every entry seems to circle back to her mother, and "waking for the phone at 2 AM for the news that would change our lives forever: mother's death." Like "Becoming the Mother," an earlier poem in the book, "Sewing without Mother" builds a bridge between Hahn's grief over her mother's death and her joy in being a mother herself.

   As with tending a newborn, the days pass slowly, the months quickly. With
   each new season we all, even the littlest, recognize what mother has
   missed, and what we see through our loss, since she died over a year ago.
   Even the bamboo shoots that father digs up with the girls and parboils for
   us to take home. Mother had suggested it and now we eat them thinking--how
   tender, how tender.

Hahn is also drawn to the mosquito and ant because of their quiet persistence and strength:

   I want my letters to resemble tiny ants scrawled across this page. ...
   their strategy is simple: the shortest distance between two points is
   tenacity not seduction.

   I want my letters to imitate mosquitoes as they loop around the earlobe ...
   the impossible task of slapping one.... ("Mosquito and Ant")

The ant is an apt mascot for Hahn's poetry, which takes its power not from wild flights of imagination but from its simplicity, its vivid and precise renderings of one woman's reflections on her everyday pleasures and disappointments. Unfortunately, the mosquito is also an apt mascot, since some of these poems tend to whine in the ear. Hahn's complaints are frequently too cliched, or superficial, to be taken seriously. She longs, Emma Bovary-like, for eloquence and sensuality, and portrays herself as mired in domestic ennui, with two daughters who say she "looks good for forty" ("Morning Light") and a husband who is a caricature of indifference. When the poet asks if he remembers "how/the wind blew spray/off the crests of waves? How/some nights our footprints/were phosphorescent?" the husband replies, "What?" ("Jam").

We're meant to commiserate with Hahn about these woes--and many others like them--but a persistent current of self-indulgence keeps snuffing out my sympathy. When the poet writes, in "Morning Light," "She feels buried: that there is no feeling left in her body only the idea of feelings," it seems clear that something horrible is going on. But when the next sentence is "She can't remember the last time her mouth watered for something like Godiva chocolates," what appeared to be tragedy is abruptly revealed as petulance.

At the same time, Hahn seems to be aware that her poems of domestic dissatisfaction might sound hackneyed, as she suggests in "Notes on the Thematic Redundancy of Women's Verse":

   While she sews the back hem of his coat before he swerves into the suited
   traffic he sits back at the breakfast table and she recounts yesterday's
   errands but cannot penetrate the news that smudges off on his fingers as he
   smoothes out each page and tells her I'm trying to read.

Here the poet acknowledges the "thematic redundancy" of the situation --women sew, men read the paper--but also means to show that the situation's familiarity doesn't make it less true. The message is post-post-feminist, a reminder that for all of feminism's gains, depressing scenes like this are still common, and still painful.

Joel Brouwer is the author of a collection of poems, "Exactly What Happened" (Purdue University Press, 1999).