How does one make one’s way in the modern world, with its difficult histories between people and competing senses of reality? What parts of the fleeting world are sufficiently relevant to capture? What sociopolitical values are worthy of mention? What is the role of poetry in a long-lived life? Is it about a profession of faith? Observations of difficult human relationships? Of lived nature?
For Canadian poet Joy Kogawa’s From the Lost and Found Department, poetry is a lifelong practice of reflection and sharing. The works capture the “magma” of high emotions in heated moments, albeit in the cooled-down stone state, after time’s passage.
This collection captures both recent works and some prior ones going back to the 1970s. The works are presented with the most recent ones first and then going back decades.
“As Apology Does” opens the collection with a rumination on integrity, as a lauded but Old World value. Kogawa writes of integrity as a robust value and practice:
except that integrity is
lost neither by
deluge nor judgment
In “For Yoshiko,” there is a high value for kindness. Several works touch on the Christian faith, sometimes more directly than others. “On the Emmaus Road” suggests that redemption is possible. “Titanic Song” rues the human tendency to reach for false idols, such as the “salvific calf” on the Titanic. “Poems for my Enemies” addresses trying to live in love and forgiveness, even of those one hates.
Human relationships are fraught, especially among family. In “Fridge Door Closing,” the narrator is conflicted:
metallic cold of fridge door thud
my father I have carried you carried you carried you
alone in the wilderness of bewilderment
where lurks your unacceptable your reptilian lust
I will not deny my love for you nor hide it
nor flee to safety
The narrator experiences relief at his death, but only to a degree.
In “You Were Perhaps Ninety-Two,” the narrator writes:
you were a painful tooth, dad
you fled to the other side of the moon
where there is weeping and gnashing
There is the suggestion that the father had chosen against his own salvation.
“A Parent’s Love is Deep” follows a father dealing with an angry and out-of-control son:
whatever horrors
my oya did
our triumph is
derision’s
not forever
Sometimes, enduring through relationship difficulties is enough.
Romantic love is not a full reprieve. In “Walk in Aquarium,” a couple goes to an aquarium after a difficult talk to decompress:
after heavy talks it is not
always easy to forgive, the
words cling, unresolved debris
rests in waiting pools—it is
not always easy to remember
there are other ways to speak,
deeper waters safer
than this harbour
Holy matrimony is described as a high desire, and yet, even those chosen fall short, as in “Yet There was Bathsheba.” “Fight # Approx. ?” describes negotiating a difficult marriage. “Divorce Lawyer” is a short work that points to the legal business of couples separating.
In “When Her Letter Arrives,” a man is harmed by a woman’s words.
her letter bombs
her fire words
and his charred yard
a minefield
of metal words
and a sculpture of air
crouching there
In “I Did Not See,” what is unforgiven between a couple destroys. “Footnote and Title” describes untenable dynamics in relationships, when people value each other differently. She writes of the relational negotiation:
he offered me
a footnote
in his book
I offered him
title
to mine.
In “Notice,” a parent’s immersion in her phone causes her to fail to connect with her own child. In “I Thrust You Away,” the poet addresses the difficulty of human relationships given differences. The writer perceives threat from others and the need to engage in self-preservation:
because the magma i
thrust you away
because breath demands
breath and the gasp
fell out of my lungs fled
down my arm because
kite strings because
silver umbilical cords the
clamp the tourniquet
In “Christmas 2019,” the poet looks at pigeon tracks on a sidewalk:
…what
footprints will we leave, you and I
as we too strut on this
speck of dust and dream
The poet’s answer is a legacy of love. Love itself may be redemptive, in “Poem for Wednesday 2021.” For those who might doubt its presence and power, the poet writes of how it transcends in the universe:
no, love
was not a mistake
love is an explosion
that flies through dwarf stars
and is not extinguished
In “Love is a Fire,” love is a strategy to outrun death:
if i could love
i would be so busily burning
that when the light
is finally out
I would have had
no time
for dying.
Both more contemporaneous and earlier works deal with aging and its challenges. “On Memory Loss,” “Blackfly,” and “Moon Tendrils My Name” all deal with aging. “Bobby Gray—Feb. 20, 1981” shows the quick passing of life:
One moment we attend
the brain’s singing
then
we are the song.
“Migrating Birds” shares a lesson in animal and human mortality. Some works read as eulogies. “March 27” celebrates new plant life at old age. Life itself cannot be taken for granted. In “Infant Still Born,” an infant born still has a spark that may mean life.
There are challenges beyond the personal. Several works touch on history and ethics. “Bureaucrats” reads in totality:
bureaucrats may kill
more people than they save
Eichmann
kept his job
the elevator waits
for the push of a button
This work suggests that people may be acting as unthinking functionaries and cause harm in the world.
In “Denial,” aesthetics are used to cover over human violence against the other:
cherry blossom
falling delicately
denies nanking
The lines suggest that Japan could wash its hands of their invasion of China, their engaging in genocidal mass murder, their using Chinese for human biomedical experimentation, and their use of coerced comfort women for their soldiers, with a sheen of civilization symbolized in cherry blossoms.
In “Child Model,” the psychological burdens of this work are not worth the exposure. In one stanza, Kogawa writes:
she dangled her tiny feet
over the edge and slid into
the shallow pool
where bright goldfish
swam for display
Several works deal with the challenges of racial discrimination. “Token” is a witty work about fighting human tokenism. “Bath” touches on human grifting or advantage-taking of others.
A series of poems touch on travel to Japan and cross-cultural observations there, such as in “Glances” (about parenting through social pressure). “For the Annual Service of Thanks that Kyoto Was Spared the Bomb” evokes the vicissitudes of history and the criticality of survival through dangerous periods of history. Some of the works chide fellow travelers who come with their greed and biases, such as “Lost Man at the Tourist Information Centre.” In “Hiroshima Exit,” she writes:
The Atomic Bomb Memorial Building:
A curiosity shop filled with
Remnants of clothing, radiation sickness,
Fleshless faces, tourists muttering
‘Well, they started it.’
Words jingle down
‘They didn’t think about us in Pearl Harbor’
They? Us?
There are responsibilities and burdens of history. There is a need for humanism, such as for those who are seen as unwanted, such as in the “Holy Name Orphanage and Fukuse Byoin.” Some of the earlier works show the power in travel, which leads to insights and heightened experiences, such as in “Black Skirt of Mount Fuji in Rain.” “Girls in the Ginza” laments Japanese girls being swayed by Western culture and going to plastic surgeons to change their look.
In “What Do I Remember of the Evacuation,” Joy Kogawa talks about the round-ups of those of Japanese origin during WWII in Canada as well:
(I hear there were people herded
Into the Hastings Park like cattle.
Families were made to move in two hours
Abandoning everything, leaving pets
And possessions at gunpoint.
I hear families were broken up.
Men were forced to work. I heard
It whispered late at night
That there was suffering)
In the poem, the narrator prays to God as a child “that I might be white.” In “Woodtick,” the racism of the Canadians is visited upon the poet’s daughter at 8…and causes the poet to recall some of her own experiences with racist peers.
“Three Dreams” finesses a sense of an idealized human reality:
on board the ship we find there are
many ways to cut the apple
to make the exquisite tiny ridges
for a special apple dessert
it’s the sort of thing that belongs
in a world without wars
Many of the author’s earlier works have a spark of humor. In “Bread for Sale,” she writes:
there’s this no-good typewriter
on this ridiculously high narrow plant stand
in front of the store on a slanted hill
and no matter how you try
flicking the ribbon lever from white to black
to red and pound and backspace
the word understand won’t come through
In the witty “Elitism,” the act of biting into a cumin seed serves as a comparative with how elitism colors so many aspects of life.
Several works touch on people’s complex relationships with animals. “Afterwards” describes the death of a pet. “It Dies by Detour” shows how bees crash against human-made surfaces, like windows, and fail to navigate the detour. “Experiment” shows human callousness and cruelty in conducting a research study.
Joy Kogawa’s From the Lost and Found Department captures generations of living and experiences in a heartfelt and humanistic way. She was in her late 80s at the time of publication. She has published children’s books and other collections of poetry prior.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
