Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason
The written Chinese character for “mouth” is a square. It’s also included in more complex characters for words like “eat”, “drink”, “breathe”, and “cry”, all words central to the necessities of life. In her recent book of poetry, An Orange, A Syllable, Gillian Sze writes about motherhood and marriage through the imagery of characters like “mouth”, as well as descriptions from pieces of art and literature.
Most of Sze’s poems are short pieces of prose, although she also includes a handful of poems that follow a different format:
the light insofar the light as partition the light’s
weight so different from yesterday the light as chassis
holding up this stillness the light and its liquids
and grooves the light’s implacable angles the light’s
hollowness the light’s collapse the light as empty
canvas the light’s impasto the light overharvested
and obedient the light speaks its own language
we pass through its vocabulary without fear
In one of the earlier prose poems, Sze writes about her child’s newborn days, which can be calm, mysterious, and scary all at once.
I saw those first nicks of light when I was staring into the child’s mouth
as she cried. A newborn’s cry begins softly, picking up in volume and
panic. Without words, I scrambled to decipher her cries, her needs… If I didn’t tend
to the child quickly enough, her cry would scale its peak: a wide o letting out a fine
strand of breath. Small body puce and stiff with fury. Silence would stream from her
and wrap me up in my own nerves.
The orange in the book’s title comes from a poem halfway into the collection when her child is eating half an orange and cannot pronounce the ‘r’, which turns the word from two syllables to one. Language acquisition coincides with her child’s growing independence. Sze also writes about her husband and their early courtship. She can trace the mouth as a symbol for life through the story of Krishna.
Our first night together, you recounted your favourite story about Krishna. When he was a child, Krishna was tasked with collecting the fruit his friends plucked from a tree. Beneath the branches, he instead ate the fruit, one by one. Aggrieved, his friends accused him of eating dirt and so informed his mother. She scolded Krishna, who insisted that he didn’t, even inviting her to look to be certain. She told him to open wide and when he did, she peered inside to discover not earth but the entire universe in his mouth. The total chaos of all existence encountered in one second. A vast speechlessness quilting her close.
Sze’s book is short at under 90 pages, yet it’s rich with memoir-like poems as shown above, as well as other poems inspired by art and literature. She writes about Flaubert and reading Madame Bovary, and Edvard Munch and the colors of The Scream, among other classics. Sze devotes the last fifteen pages and ends the book with musings on the Dutch painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and his wife, Ida. Hammershøi created five dozen paintings inside his apartment and to Sze these images give her a sense of home.
It was just like stepping into a painting where a door opened to another room, and another door into another room. And at each turn, the light bent, never far behind. And when the mouth opens, naturally, it, too, has a great deal more to say.
An Orange, A Syllable by Gillian Sze
ECW Press, 2025, $24.95
978-1-77041-851-6
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of a memoir and two biographies, with a third on the way. She co-edited an anthology of noir stories set in Hong Kong and is also a regular contributor to Asian Review of Books, World Literature Today, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and the Jewish Book Council.