Victoria Chang, _The Trees Witness Everything_

 ANOTHER INSTALLMENT IN this spring's deep dive into the work of Victoria Chang. This 2022 collection is mainly devoted to waka, that is, "various Japanese syllabic forms" that were part of "the court poetry of the sixth to fourteenth centuries" in Japan (as Chang's endnote explains), such as the tanka, the katauta, the sedoka. To mix things up a bit, Chang chose her titles from the poetry of W. S. Merwin (sometimes reading the poem of that title. sometimes not), chose a traditional Japanese syllabic form, and then composed her own poem.

As procedures go, this one sounds a bit eccentric and not all that promising, but the resulting poems mainly work, I would say. They often feel traditional both in their concision and their imagery (rain, trees, birds); they are also traditional in their preoccupation with loss and isolation. Those themes have been so thoroughly explored in Chang's earlier work, however, (e.g., Dream Memory, Obit, Barbie Chang) that the collection readily takes its place in the constellation of her body of work.

Chang's collections often have a dominating form, like the detourné obituaries of Obit or the couplets of Barbie Chang, but also a section in a different form, serving as a sort of counterpoint, like the waka of Obit or the sonnets to of Barbie Chang. Here, we have "Marfa, Texas," a longer poem in stanzas of five short lines, both left- and right-justified to create a column centered in the page, somewhat reminiscent of Chinese or Japanese manuscript writing. 

"Marfa, Texas" seems to be written during and about some kind of artist's residency there, which doesn't sound promising, but then, how different is that from the circumstances that produced Rilke's Duino Elegies? Anyway, it seems to me one of the best things she has done. Very much of a piece with her other work in that it seems disengaged and highly engaged at the same time, very much about what is present before but also about what is absent. 

Victoria Chang reminds me a bit of Louise Glück--not that she sounds like Glück, or shares Glück's preoccupations, but in her poems she becomes very present even in the act of seeming to disappear. I couldn't say whether Chang is headed for a Nobel Prize, but she is certainly effective at what she does. Every book is very different, but also fits in as part of a whole.