Journey Cake (review)

Journey Cake by Tam Lin Neville. Kansas City: BkMk Press, 1998. 75 pages, paper $11.95.

Amid the vivid images of flowers and flames found in Tam Lin Neville's first full-length collection, Journey Cake, theater imagery appears prominently. In fact, many of her poems read like stage directions for one-act morality plays. In "The Understudy's Hand," we see a man devoted to a role he will never play, that of the hero who "doesn't understand his world / and wants to find someone who does / but his shoes are worn out, there is no more bread." Between acts, the understudy "repairs the hero's shoes and puts crusts in his pack," much as Neville herself provides readers with all they need in order to make the mental journey to the place where her characters come into being:

Late afternoon, the clouds sealed but still heavy
after a day of rain. The woodsmen had left
their blackened fires, sodden smoke
wound through the trees,
through curtains of fog over the river.

The American gazed over the valley
as though alone at the theatre.

In the following poem, "Tourist Rapt in Chinese Monastery," we are transported in the course of a few swift lines to a world many of us might not otherwise see. There, like actors, we are invited by the poem to engage the imagination for its highest purpose: understanding what lies outside our personal experience. The American tourist turns to a boy "eating fish and rice from a box":

Cold and unappetizing, she thought,
but entranced by his hands,
the quick work he made of the meal,
she wondered, Hunger like that . . .
was it a ladder or a hole with scraps?

She had come for a day
to this valley he would never leave.

Neville writes, "Duplicity? Imagination doesn't care / but wakes up every morning wanting to make what it wants, / something it doesn't have." This statement might serve as her ars poetica, but imagination, and its siblings memory and contemplation, also play a part in helping us make sense of what we do have: that which lies within our experience and yet remains incomprehensible. The deaths of children, which are addressed in several poems at the heart of Neville's collection, are one example. A mother, staring at the earth beside her drowned daughter's grave, sees it as "a book fallen open to a page [she] cannot read."

For Neville, reading and writing seem to be equally imaginative acts, and she takes every opportunity to pay homage to those she's read, particularly the Chinese poets Po Chui, Yu Hsuan-chi, and Yuan Chen. She does this overtly in such poems as "Spring Comes to Hsia Kuei," "A Cup of Wine," and "Reading Yu Hsuan-chi Late at Night," and more subtly by means of the rich simplicity of style she derives from them.

Although she was raised and educated in the United States, it is evident that the time Neville spent in China and Japan enriched her writing immeasurably. Toward the middle of the book's third and final section, however, a shift in perspective from East to West occurs, and we are presented with the contemporary American insistence on a democratic aesthetic: a "girl . . . watching TV, drinking a coke, her mother / and her mother's mother cradling their coffee cups, / sucking their first smokes of the day" is equal to "clouds of bees disappear[ing] into jewelweed / humming in yellow billows up and down the slope."

Unlike much of the work in Journey Cake, few of these last poems were previously published, and it is hard to see why they were included here. Earlier in the book, care was obviously taken to present the reader with things not as they are, but as they might be seen through the eyes of one whose vision is indiscriminately redemptive. "Who cares for things as they are!" Neville exclaims in the best of her poems, transforming the ordinary--a man standing by a flower--into vehicles of...