People Are Tiny in Paintings of China                                                                       

Cynthia Arrieu-King                                                                                               

Octopus Books, 2010

Review by J. Mae Barizo

In her thoughtful and intricate début, Cynthia Arrieu-King weaves a subtle narrative of race and identity in the modern world.  “My poetry asks what happens when the other speaks rather than merely being named,” stated Arrieu-King in a May 2010 interview[i]; in “People Are Tiny in Paintings of China” this other takes the form of a grandmother whose ashes are “alone like an abandoned dog”, a Frenchman who asks her for directions and a dead patient “with hair fluffed as down.”  The voice in Arrieu-King’s poems is sonorous in a polychoral fashion as opposed to the solipsism of a lead-singer who wants to hog the limelight.  While the “I” is present, she prefers the stance of the flaneur, a term critic James Wood notably utilizes to describe a character with a perspicacious, narrative eye. According to Wood “Flaubert founds this new style of realism on his use of the eye—the authorial eye, and the character’s eye.” A flaneur “walks the street with no great urgency, seeing, looking, reflecting.  We know this type from Baudelaire, from the all-seeing narrator of Rilke’s autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge…”[ii]  In the same vein Arrieu-King tells us more about her narrator by describing what she sees, a flaneur who walks us through the rooms of her experience, so we observe through the same discerning lens.  The opening poem of the collection “In the Portrait of Solitude”—which builds on a passage from Ashbery—demonstrates how the narrator views the world, albeit through a convex mirror:

“…there’s no direct stare detectable, but room for five, ten,

every soul to chase after her own fact like fish

trailing off disparate.  The globe’s pragmatic info,

fluorescent resource, light warning us

to yield to others, seeing them slight,

wielding clipboards.  This is insignificance:

that is, the colors of the uniforms, navy or teal,

and the bleak hunch of shoulders tired of pushing other

humans through a warped thoroughfare.”

The best poems in this collection—and this includes all of the prose poems—open up the reader to Arrieu-King’s skill as a extraordinary perceiver, if I may use that curious term.  This is what makes many of the poems resonate in a way that is rare in modern poetry, and especially in poetry that refers, even obliquely, to race.  Never sounding sententious or self-important, the poems rather permit us observe the narrator’s world through a lens which Arrieu-King has devised for the reader with her masterly attention to detail.  Each section of the book commences with prose passages which acutely suggest themes that are present in the subsequent poems: mistaken identity, fallacies, a change of name, racial slights.  Arrieu’s prose sections glow with a type of flash-fiction patina.  What is most impressive is not the intertwine of the leitmotifs but the almost mannerist aesthetic of restraint and control which infuses them.  I will quote two of them here in their entirety:

My grandfather was a Chinese ambassador to Belgium.  He changed the last name

to King while there.  He didn’t want to go there and be Mr. Chien, anybody’s Mr.

Dog.  I’m not sure this is true. 

and later in the collection:

In the third grad Matt Philpot runs up behind me, shoves a xylophone mallet up

under my skirt and between my legs and says, hey chink, your daddy’s just a chink. 

Years later at Revco, he is a polite burly social worker and rides a Harley David-

son.  As we part, I tell him to take care.

These elegant and unexpected portraits are tiny paintings in themselves, hinting at discord without sounding contrived or precious.

Yet what makes these sections shine is what works against Arrieu in the less successful poems.   Many of Arrieu-King’s strongest attributes as a writer stem from what seems to be an almost novelistic tendency, a keen regard for structure and plot and the ability to write through other characters.  Add this to her almost uncanny gift at noticing things.  Yet with this entry into the narrator’s sphere it is often deceptively easy to lose sight of the narrator herself.  Take the poem “Three Heads, Six Arms; with Superhuman Strength”, whose title alone is fairly overwhelming.  The name of a colossal sculpture by the Chinese artist Zhang Huan, “Three Heads, Six Arms” refers to the fragmented extremities of Buddhist statues, many of which Zhang Huan found in a Tibetan market.  While the poem itself is embedded with cultural references (Arrieu-King’s father was from China, and her mother is French) the poised vulnerability of the poem—not to mention the elegiac quality the image of a desecrated limb connotates—seems buried by verbiage:

“Countryside gored with holes.

hand dug, one large, one small, miles of thread-less stitches

miles of kneelers digging space

as if the earth can’t get enough light.

Ten thousand freeze-dried trees to stop the Gobi, a million

million million

gold specks rasping…”

While reading, I found myself longing for a more immediate vantage point into the narrator’s purview.  As with most exceptional contemporary poetry, Arrieu-King’s work often proffers the reader various points of entry.  My longing seemed not to stem from a lack of ingress into the poems themselves but rather from what seemed like the narrator’s apprehension on relying as fully on the experiences of mourning and ethnological discord as on documentation and poetic devices to convey significance and emotional import. 

The delicate disaffectedness in some of Arrieu-King’s poems often gives way to an exquisite chromaticism that makes what seem like conventional post-modern lyrics flourish into a syntax and energy that is astonishing, but at the same time, seems intuitive.  Like Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge, whose long, refined lines often read like a suave collage of intersecting cultures, Arrieu-King’s poems speak across hospital rooms and continents, the voices resounding like choristers singing from different spatial locations.  There is a polyphony at work in this collection that focuses a broad gaze over a room or a scene and at the same time intimates a stunning geography of loss.  Compelling, refractive, and always probing, Arrieu-King schools the reader in the machinations of an intelligent eye.

[i] http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2010/05/untitled-cynthia-arrieu-king.html

[ii] Wood, James. “How Fiction Works” (New York: Picador, 2008) 48.