BOOK REVIEW:
RENDANG by Will Harris
The first poem I read by Will Harris was “Bee Glue,” published for “Poem of the Week” in the The Guardian (30 Oct 2017). It describes figures painted on an ancient vase and moves to his father’s own work restoring ceramics. The last seven lines are:
Give me a love that’s unassimilated, sharp
as broken pots. That can’t be taken; granted.
My dad would work among the blue and white
pieces of a Ming vase—his job to get it
passable. He’d gather every bit and after days
assembling, filling in (putty, spit, glue),
draw forth—not sweetness—something new.
This poem is retitled “State-Building” in the present collection, a renaming that is apt, given the topics of colonialism and slavery at work here, in both the description of the vase in earlier stanzas and what the reader learns about the speaker’s own heritage in the course of the book. What struck me the most, though, is how Harris composes such an aesthetically beautiful poem about immensely difficult topics.
Harris is an English poet of Indonesian heritage. He pays homage to all of his cultural influences in RENDANG, which is not only the title of the book but also a series of numbered poems—rendang is a slow-cooked traditional Indonesian meat dish characterized by multiple flavor components and spices; it is culturally symbolic and significant. Harris evokes relatives who have passed away, such as his Indonesian grandmother, and writes about the early days of his parents’ relationship as a mixed-race couple in England:
Younger than I am now,
she put an electric kettle on
the hob and nearly set the house
ablaze. Fire fire fire!
Her whole life like that plastic
handle burnt out of shape. (“RENDANG”)
He also embraces western cultural influences he has absorbed throughout his education as a poet. Poets from Ben Johnson to Derek Walcott, philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and musicians from Robert Schumann to John Coltrane people the book. The right wording might be he employs western culture as well as embraces it, since he conveys how, even though he has a mind full of English poetry, he is often judged only by his perceived racial identity. For example, in one poem, a passerby assumes the speaker of the poem knows the location of the fire that broke out in London on June 14, 2017, in Grenfell Tower, a building whose occupants were primarily poor and people of color (“RENDANG”).
Race, ethnicity, and identity are major themes but also significant are appropriation and erasure. “Glass Case” describes how two Javan masks, taken as artifacts by the Dutch East Indian Governor, are displayed in the British Museum:
for counterpoint they have been
placed beside two mummified heads
one of which retains the bandaging
that has corroded from the other
Displaying the dead as objects for view is obviously offensive. Additionally, the masks are taken out of context, put into a new, artificial context. They lose, rather than gain, meaning. Once brought to life by dancers, they now sit lifeless next to remains of the dead.
In “Another Life,” the speaker listens to a white male poet at a public reading, who relates a dream about a burning hayrick: “I heard in him a vision of Old England / untouched by foreign hands.” The urban England Harris brings to life is definitely not the Anglo-Saxon, pastoral stereotype which the other poet lauds and which is likely a false nostalgia in any case, since England long held a global empire.
Aurally beautiful lyrics like “State-Building” have Romantic forebears, though Harris also draws on surrealist imagery, irony, and science fiction references, setting a very different tone. “The Hanged Man” describes a character’s consumption habits, which might seem familiar to many of us: Buying groceries, then forsaking them to go to Chipotle for lunch, binge-buying Bruce Springsteen’s entire back catalogue. Then the poem exits the familiar as
The next week, listening to Human Touch, he dozed
and woke to find himself floating two feet off the ground.
Hanging there. His parents were alive and dead.
If only he could keep completely still he could remain
unscattered, forever on the edge of rain.
Levitation seems fitting for a speaker who can claim many origins, and thus feels most comfortable in a liminal state.
“Pathetic Earthlings” describes Planet Mongo, where beings communicate telepathically; however, “Though impressive technologically, this has / one defect: you can’t refuse to take a telepathic call.” The poem is both funny and absurd, while it raises questions about privacy, as well as accuracy, for “you can never know for certain whose head you’re in.”
While loss and suffering are always nearby in poems about heritage and identity, the book as a whole isn’t somber, as “Pathetic Earthlings” suggests. The speaker of “Glass Case” says of his mother’s generation, “Over three decades later, Chinese Indonesians are still keeping their heads low—-neither China nor Indonesia is home,” and this kind of deracination does pervade the book. Our speaker, though, is also a bit of a trickster:
OTHER, MIXED is what I tick
in forms though some
drunk nights I theorize my own
transmembered norms
I only wish the poem ended with one or two permutations of the category “Other” that his drunken self might conjure.
A dry humor characterizes the first line of “Holy Man”: “Everywhere was coming down with Christmas.” As in the United States, so in England, apparently: “but what was it— / October?” Later, wondering why a stranger stops to talk to him, he says, “I’d been dawdling, staring at people on business lunches. Restaurants / like high-end clinics, etherized on white wine,” a sharp and funny image of how antiseptically designed modern establishments are.
In “Break,” the speaker comes across as real and relatable, even though—perhaps because—the poem references Tolkien, the Bible, and Dr. Dre, in that order. The poem plays on multiple meanings of the word break, to describe a relationship being on hiatus, poetic line breaks, rhythmical drum breaks, and heartbreak.
I could go on for pages about some of my favorite poems in the collection and how beautiful and powerful they are, but allotted space requires many regrettable omissions. I’ll end by saying that Will Harris is a poet to follow and that “Break” and “State-Building” together hint at his ars poetica, for it does seem that out of shards of ancient pottery, English poetry, and multicultural heritage he has created something both sweet and new.
Janna Knittel lives in Minnesota but still sometimes calls the Pacific Northwest “home.” Janna’s publications include a chapbook, Fish & Wild Life (Finishing Line, 2018) and poems forthcoming or recently published in Between These Shores Literary and Arts Annual, Blueline, Cottonwood, North Dakota Quarterly, Split Rock Review, Up North Lit, Whale Road Review, and Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Anthology. Awards and recognition include a 2019 Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.