{"id":5566,"date":"2012-04-30T07:00:27","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=5566"},"modified":"2012-04-30T01:39:56","modified_gmt":"2012-04-30T05:39:56","slug":"review-christine-kitanos-birds-of-paradise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/30\/review-christine-kitanos-birds-of-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Christine Kitano’s BIRDS OF PARADISE"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Birds of Paradise<\/a> by Christine Kitano | Lynx House Press 2011 | $15.95<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cPlain, gray, and though I didn\u2019t \/ know Latin then, still could guess \/ what inornatus<\/em> might mean,\u201d writes Kitano in the closing poem of her collection, referring here to the baeolophus inornatus<\/em>, or plain titmouse, that flies into her family\u2019s kitchen and is promptly killed. She demands a funeral, identifying with the poor bird:<\/p>\n

Plain gray Christine, also known as
\nthe plain daughter, Filia inornata<\/em>
\nof the Kitano family. Plain gray
\nabove, paler gray below; crest gray.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The irony of the plain, filial bird emerges when placed in conversation with the title poem of the collection, \u201cBirds of Paradise,\u201d which refers not to birds but to a plantfrom South Africa that looks like the birds. The title also calls to my mind the \u201cfalse birds of paradise\u201d plant from the Hawaiian islands that looks like the South African plant. I mention all this in order to call attention to the layers of resemblance and recognition\u2014crucial themes to this book of poems. In the title poem, our plain filia inornata<\/em> cups the bird of paradise plant in her hand, pretending \u201cto be an African queen, the stunning orange \/ bird my companion, or Sleeping Beauty, \/ the flower\u2019s sharp stigma a poisoned spindle.\u201d A child of Japanese and Korean immigrants, her marginality and desires push her to imagine a still greater and still more exotic paradise than the one to whichher family has arrived.<\/p>\n

In these narrative memoir poems, the search for self is expressed in instances of the estranged and wondrous. Kitano\u2019s project orbits around moments of mistaken recognition, as in the title poem, for instance, which ends with an image of the speaker\u2019s father: \u201cHe swam with such power \/ I almost forgot who he was.\u201d In \u201cForm,\u201d in which the night and morning of her father\u2019s death are condensed into small moments, traces of him are sought after in his stereo set:<\/p>\n

White noise hummed
\nout of the speakers, from which I tried
\nto recognize a voice. But no, and when
\nI drew the curtains open, the room filled
\nnot with ash, but light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This last line evokes misperception to clarify a perception, something we see often in Kitano\u2019s poems. \u201cAfter the Show\u201d ends with a road that looks like a rope that looks like a river, while clematis blooms look like stars lining that road, which, \u201cFrom where I stand . . . might be vanishing.\u201d Another poem, \u201cInsomniac\u2019s Best Nightmare,\u201d ends with the speaker waking from a dream during the day: \u201cThe sky is still black\u2014not with night, \/ but crows.\u201d And in \u201cFinding the Family Tree,\u201d the speaker\u2019s schizophrenic brother \u201cthinks [she\u2019s] someone else,\u201d the girls at school \u201cpretend not to know [her],\u201d and:<\/p>\n

In the bathroom mirror, under the humming
\nfluorescent light, behind the face
\nof my dead sister, I am sad, again
\nto find myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kitano uses metaphor to collapse identities and associations into one another. In \u201cBile,\u201d for instance, the speaker\u2019s mother accuses her of being the source of her unhappiness. The poem’s cinematic angle pans back and forth between the silent \u201cI\u201d and the mother who keeps accusing the \u201cyou.\u201d Lines are enjambed on the command, \u201cLook,\u201d and the poem ends, finally, with a conflated identity in which three generations are invoked and the words spoken become incommunicable, nonlinear, supernatural:<\/p>\n

My mother cries<\/p>\n

for her mother, calls out,
\nher crooked words Korean,
\nand cryptic as a spell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many of the poems are memories of the poet\u2019s father, and chronicle the end of those who are gone or lost. Other poems form a series on insomnia\u2014that state of being half-awake and without a sense of time\u2014and is perhaps telling of this poet\u2019s writing process, as we see in this ending to \u201cCooking at Night:\u201d \u201cAnd I\u2019ll spend every night \/ like this, writing to someone \/ who sleeps in another world.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are also poems in search of wholeness. Paradise is a ghost in these poems, and its imagining is a stupefied act of grasping and remembering. \u201cUntwinned\u201d reaches for a deceased twin, for whom the speaker invents a personality: \u201cShe likes the Greek myths, \/ the flame-breathing chimera \/ that swallows its own throat.\u201d But this is just a mirror which the narrator keeps under her pillow. The poem ends: \u201cWhen I can\u2019t \/ sleep, I practice fitting my fist \/ into my mouth. It helps me \/ to feel whole.\u201d These poems are a self-swallowing act, an effort to consume the past, and an impossible effort to close and fit into a full shape. They are poems of lingering and muted absences. \u201cLuis\u2019s Hands\u201d reaches a momentary closeness between two restaurant employees, but ends with the remains of solitude:<\/p>\n

That night,
\nwhen I undressed,
\nI found an amber bruise
\non my thigh. I pressed
\nmy dry fingers against it
\nand went to bed thinking
\nof Luis, the muted smell
\nof lemon still on my hand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And these are poems of existing within narrow margins, even inside the household. Here are a few lines from \u201cDrowning:\u201d<\/p>\n

I tried to disappear,
\ninvisibility the best defense against
\nmy mother\u2019s anger. I pinned my hair
\nacross my eyes like a fence,
\npulled the drawstring
\nhood of my sweatshirt
\ntight against my throat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Disappearance, a boundary, a noose. This poem ends with a dream \u201cof drowning, face to face,\u201d in which the wish to vanish is impossible. One is always seen, or seeing, even if plain and gray.<\/p>\n

Birds of Paradise<\/em> is an apt title for the collection, as paradise exists only in the imagination, always lost or out of reach, much in the same way as nostalgia. And birds of paradise are only resemblances, creatures or plants or people who seem to belong to this out-of-reach space. The poems\u00a0thus leaveone feeling close and remote at the same time, estranged and yet familiar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Birds of Paradise by Christine Kitano | Lynx House Press 2011 | $15.95   \u201cPlain, gray, and though I didn\u2019t \/ know Latin then, still could guess \/ what inornatus might mean,\u201d writes Kitano in the closing poem of her collection, referring here to the baeolophus inornatus, or plain titmouse, that flies into her family\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[847,846],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5566"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5609,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5566\/revisions\/5609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}