The Secret of Hoa Sen

When we talk about poets writing from the heart, it’s because we feel their integrity. When I say that Que Mai’s writing hands you her heart and lets you hold it, still beating and bleeding, while she tells her stories, it’s because she keeps nothing back and she trusts us to attend.And you do have to attend, especially if you are coming to this with a Western ear, because the language is more musical, the metaphors more earthy, and the characters and messages more deceptively simple than one might expect.Read Que Mai’s history and you will see why this is. Born in North Vietnam just after the end of the war and at the beginning of the reunification that brought with it recrimination and huge social upheaval, Que Mai’s voice is an unfamiliar one because it is female, embedded in family and traditions, and uses the language of dislocated, traumatised, but gentle survivors clinging to their roots and sowing the seeds of new ones.Adjust yourself to this style and you will find lines like this:“…the purple summer bang lang flowers, the aromatic lotus budsall conspire to nomad me into the night markets of Quang Ba …” Ha Noi“Vowels, consonantsengraved by the shaken rhythm of a naked heart,I touch the hair of sunrise,my lips the morning’s nightingale.” Touching the Hair of SunriseThe ‘right’ word in Vietnamese does not always translate into an equally right word in English but instead gives rise to an utterly unusual word that is perfect in its place and its old and new meanings.Or this:“Immense, immense the sound of your laughter and speech,tweeting your pouting voices.You are the adults, and I am the child.” Speaking with My ChildrenThe undertow of rhythm here is not reflective of Western pounding bass, thudding feet, trains, or machinery, but the bells and chimes of Vietnamese music which must surely be the unconscious river that carries the language.My personal favourite is Quang Tri which begins:The mother runs towards us,the names of her children fill her eye sockets.She’s screaming “Where are my children?”It describes in minimalistic stanzas the lifetime impact on one woman of the battle at Quang Tri, one of the bloodiest of the US-Vietnam war.I was lucky to meet Que Mai during our course at Lancaster. I heard her read both in English and in Vietnamese and I learned new things about poetry and the value of difference. If you get a chance to hear her, do so. If not, read these works and think of bells.

Beautifully written, transports you back to simpler times. Very elegant book! A must for the soul.

‘The Secret of Hoa Sen’ is a recent collection of poetry from the poet and novelist, Nguyen Phan Que Mai. Her poems are concerned with the human condition. She is an observer, but she observes through the eyes of the many: ‘I mirror myself into your eyes’ is the opening line from one of the many poems. It encapsulates the acute sensitivity caught in her writing about the distress of others. This empathy and her ability to accept other’s perspectives continue throughout the pages. She makes use of first, second and third person viewpoints, both singular and plural, in order to encompass all. It is the face of personal sufferance alive in a world of oppression and natural disaster that she uncovers through her words.The images, Nguyen Phan Que Ma portray may appear as simply described but her sentiments potent. For example, alluding to the garment worker of Bangladesh she writes, ‘… they had sewn the broken patches of their lives with the needles of their patience … into shirts that men in the West paid for with a peck of dirt.’ Nguyen Phan Que Mai is not hesitant at expressing anger at wrong-doing. However, and unusually, she does not voice vitriol towards the persecutor. Her heart beats alongside the pulsing of other hearts, whatever their background. She walks through their dark ‘forests’ and swims aside them in their rough seas. Her insights, always sensitive to the oneness of human experience, often surfaces within the waves of her words. In her poems, ‘Separated Worlds’ and ‘Vietnam Veterans Memorial’, for example, Nguyen Phan Que Mai emphasises how a sense of loss and suffering is an universal emotion: the sadness of oppressor as well as that of the oppressed acknowledged and heard with a gracious understanding. The gentle lull of Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s native Viet Namese language could have been easily lost without a sensitive translation. But her voice sings out sentient-full of colour, smell, taste and texture portraying nature and life in the faraway. These faraway places, however, are not portrayed as distant, or as being lands apart from us. They are the locations of the everyday in the everyplace. She writes as if those lands are our own homelands which are, ‘rocking us’ in their embrace. All humans are similar, she suggests, all live under the same ‘Rain of no nationality’. Our own misfortunes are ‘Only an arm-span’ away.Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s own love of humanity emerges through the evocative lines of her poetry. She records ordinary people trying to survive the needless traumas encroaching upon their daily lives. Her message is simple: care for each other. We are but one.

"The Secret of Hoa Sen" is a powerfully moving collection of poems by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, opening portals of deep insight into life at levels from the daily and routine to the upper reaches of existential contemplation and reflection,  often weaving them together as the verses unfold. Printed in the original Vietnamese at left and English translation on the right, it opens with an Introduction by Bruce Weigl, who helped with the English translations.My introduction to her writing came over a year ago via her deeply touching (and often heart-rending) debut novel, "The Mountains Sing". In becoming more familiar with her work (I strongly encourage looking up some of her talks and interviews online) I heard her remark that in some ways "The Mountains Sing" is a long poem in novel form. Indeed its prose is immensely and beautifully poetic and, in learning that she had numerous books of poetry published prior to the novel, I was very happy to obtain and then immerse myself in the poems which compose "The Secret of Hoa Sen".The poems in this volume lay out a compelling tapestry of emotion and thought, threading masterfully across themes including parental and familial love (very movingly, there are poems dedicated individually to many members of Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's family — each intensely personal and captivatingly unique); poems exploring Vietnamese legend and modern art, landscapes of stunning beauty, enchanting verses alighting upon flowers and plants native to Vietnam. Also included are heartfelt tributes to human tragedy, such as "Bài thơ chưa thể đặt tên" / "The Poem I Can't Yet Name", and "Những người công nhân dệt may Bangladesh" / "The Garment Workers of Bangladesh" respectively about the Vietnamese Famine of 1945 and a tragic factory collapse, were and are particularly awareness-expanding and powerful to me. Additionally, several poems explore the legacy of the war which many Americans still perhaps associate most strongly with Vietnam — "the American War", as it is commonly called in her home country. One of the most moving passages addressing the war is found in "Quê Nội" / "My Father's Home Village": "The war rushed in; village / men left and few came back, / pain engraved white on the old ones' hair. / My father's childhood was filled with bombs and bullets; / ... my father still believed, still plowed and hoed, / the village roads fragrant again with the scent of new cut hay./ ...The curves of the village temple, / the Persian lilacs' purple, / the sunset with low-flying stork wings. / I hug the rice straw to sleep. / Because I keep my homeland in my heart, / my harvest is rich, / all year round."Other poems exploring the war and its legacy share her intensely personal experience visiting the Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, and a meal shared with a befriended (perhaps newly?) American veteran of the war.Still other poems on the same theme, such as "Hai nẻo trời và đất / Separated Worlds", and "Quảng Trị" illuminate the tragic emotional and physical wounds still experienced by many of the people of Vietnam, many years into the aftermath of the war. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's poems on these themes deserve our utmost attention for their courage, honesty, and vital wisdom as warnings against the folly of war, and passionate threads of hope helping us chart a path toward a better and more peaceful world.Poems of other focus in "The Secret of Hoa Sen" sound strong chords of hopefulness, often born from the harshness of life, as the passage from "Cõi Xanh" / "The Green Sphere" reads: "Oh my river, / I did not know I was the rice field during drought / until the river brought the song of joyful water, from far away, flooding me with possibility, / so I may die, flowing into him".As a whole, this beautiful collection sends the powerful message that tenacity, hope, and love persist, in spite of and beyond the tragedies of life. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's poems shine in tones courageous and eloquent, feeding a weary world stories of wisdom, grace, and a determined resolve that the painful chapters of our past have not been struggled through in vain.

There is much loveliness in the autobiographical poems of this volume, as Nguyen Phan Que Mai watches her mother’s chopsticks “twirl sunlight into a pot of boiling rice” and “sing the rice to cook.” As, over a bowl of soup, she reunites soulfully with her long-dead grandfather, then falls into the welcoming embrace of her mother in law who lives on a distant continent. As when she takes a look at her farmer father and sees “behind his simple faded shirt, love overflowing.”The fragrance of guava fruit and lotus flower perfumes these pages as it does all Vietnamese poetry, but this author easily retools the particular into the universal, when, for example, she lauds “the fragrance of the bodies of mowed grass” which fills the earth’s surface. “No smell is sweeter than the wounds of grass,” she claims and I can vouch for that from Canada where I am writing these words.The author’s tender gaze does not miss the ravages of war in her country, of the shadows in the eyes of the children, now grown, who do not remember their fallen fathers’ faces. Nor does shy shy away from the ravages of rapid modernization and of new class divisions. With sober compassion she reaches beyond the borders of Vietnam to the victims of hard-hearted brutality and of cruel accidents and earthquakes.The poetry of this collection comes from a thinking person with a big heart for her family and for the family of mankind.

I enjoyed Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing so much, that I went in search of more of her writing. This led me to The Secret of Hoa Sen. Although published 6 years ago, it presages and expounds upon many of the themes prevalent in her novel: the importance of family, the vitality of Vietnam, the universality of nature and our relation to it. The poems in this book are subtle yet powerful, and share humanity in a way the world needs most right now, person to person. Quế Mai’s heartfelt empathy and love for her family, for her country, for the world and us all shine through in this incredible collection of poems.

“Truth-in-Advertising” – I read and write poetry every day … for me it is not a supplement, but a staple of my daily diet. This book was a gourmet meal. These poems are sumptuous … full of flavor and savory tastes. But, I warn fellow “diners” … chew slowly. There is a lot to digest! We are served platters of memory and hope that have been simmering in Vietnam as the people there have lived through generations of war in which the goodness and badness of people on all sides are revealed through the family recipes used to prepare, cook, and serve this many-course meal.

These poems by Ms Nguyen reward the reader with extraordinary insights into ordinary things. When she writes about her mother cooking rice or dreams of eating pho with her grandfather, she conjures up familiar images and smells and enables us to feel the hardness of life and the work ethic of the Vietnamese people. She shares her humanity with us and makes us appreciate the miracle of everyday life, where ever it is we live. Poem after poem, I am reminded that my favorite poets are able to excite a myriad of emotions within me, by being passionately involved with everyday things in life.