About the book…
Flèche (the French word for ‘arrow’) is an offensive technique commonly used in fencing, a sport of Mary Jean Chan’s young adult years, when she competed locally and internationally for her home city, Hong Kong. This cross-linguistic pun presents the queer, non-white body as both vulnerable (‘flesh’) and weaponised (‘flèche’), and evokes the difficulties of reconciling one’s need for safety alongside the desire to shed one’s protective armour in order to fully embrace the world.
Central to the collection is the figure of the poet’s mother, whose fragmented memories of political turmoil in twentieth-century China are sensitively threaded through the book in an eight-part poetic sequence, combined with recollections from Chan’s childhood. As complex themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and cultural history emerge, so too does a richly imagined personal, maternal and national biography. The result is a series of poems that feel urgent and true, dazzling and devastating by turns.
It is my huge honour to be taking part in a blogtour from Midas PR which is celebrating all the titles nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2020. Today I am reviewing ‘Fleche’ by Mary Jean Chan which is published by Faber Books.
Oh boy. Here we go again, I will do my very best to try and relay the physical and emotional reactions that these poems evinced in me-however, I am not a skilled wordsmith so apologies to the author and publisher if I have missed the point by a massive margin, and also for potentially clumsy phrasing.
There is a duality at the heart of these poems which is exquisitely rendered and then skewered by the author-it is as if she is fencing with the words which she very deliberately chooses and creates a duel between intention and effect.
The first thing I noticed is her statement of intent to use English as the medium to write in-in poems such as ‘A Wild Patience Has taken Me This Far’ and ‘Always’ which says to me that for her poet mother to ‘read’ these poems and understand the words, she will need to translate them. You have to dig to find the meaning.
The conflict between masculine and feminine, expectation and reality is constructed from cultural bedrock of gender roles and belonging or rather, straddling two worlds. ‘Straight’ and ‘gay’ become polar opposites in social conventions and the heartbreaking ‘Conversations with Fantasy Mother’ should be a reality not a dream for a young person coming out. It is heartbreaking in its yearning intent.
‘the five stages’ takes the Kubler-Ross concepts of grief and applies them, to and applies them to a parental relationship in a extraordinarily moving set of verses which are written in a way that implies urgency and demands to be listened to.
I enjoyed the journey through ‘Fleche’ as the different forms of poetry were written in a way that affected the flow and urgency of their message-it felt like an elegant and swiftly moving exhibition which by the end I was saddened to finish. It left me choked with feelings and bereft that I do not have the skills needed to deeply analyse these words, but what I did take away was a deep and immediate connection to the body of work on dsiplay. It is brave, bold and experimental in tone whilst deeply culturally aware. I loved it.
About the author…
Mary Jean Chan is a Chinese-British poet, lecturer and editor. Her first poetry collection, Flèche, won the 2019 Costa Book Award in the Poetry category. She was also a recipient of the 2019 Eric Gregory Award for a collection by poets under the age of 30. Chan is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and co-editor of Oxford Poetry. She currently lives in London, and is Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University.
Links – https://www.swansea.ac.uk/dylan-thomas-prize/
Twitter @dylanthomprize @midaspr @Faberbooks
Author
bridgeman.lenny@gmail.com