How to Close Read a Family: Quiet Night Think by Gillian Sze

Gillian Sze’s quiet night think picks up on a Tang Dynasty text familiar to many in the Chinese diaspora: the titular poem by Li Bai. Sitting with sound, speechlessness, the stakes of literary translation, how a child relates to a heritage language in an Anglocentric world, a poem’s history, and a poet’s loneliness, Sze opens a window to allow the “economical and pithy” (“Quiet Night Think”) lines of Chinese poetry, alongside the gravitas of literary criticism, to shine on her life and family.   

Sze’s triptych of poetry, criticism, and memoir moves deliberately, expertly. Not assuming her audiences are in the know, this patience offers spaciousness. Sze, indeed, has been searching for space, is interested in finding space within language, in how loss creates space, and in what that space does. That space is also a rarely expressed empathy for new mothers, for the writing bodymind that is also a new mother. In reading Sze’s intimate and honest reflection of the birth of her son, one feels connected to the startling, incommensurable effort it takes to write, to live, to garden, to bring new life into the world all at once: “Sitting in the moon is a transformation. You come out of it no longer the same person and no longer the same poet” (“Sitting Inside the Moon”). To create is also to change oneself.

The space Sze offers is generous, measured. She moves from moment to moment, word to word, pacing readers through ideas and experiences like a gentle stream. By the time she lands on a deeper reflection on ekphrasis poetry, readers almost forget that ekphrasis was Sze’s approach all along—art, language, seasons, life, and loss are seamlessly intertwined throughout each piece; interconnectedness is key to Sze’s vision of the world. quiet think night is an insightful, meditative ars poetica and love letter to her family; bringing insights from her teaching, Sze allows readers to feel assured that language and poetry can mend discordant family wounds and grow love in the aftermaths of loss and in raising new generations.

The experience of motherhood is also central to this assurance, through which Sze deepens her stakes: in “Nursery,” her speaker imagines motherhood as a form of theorizing: “I am overwhelmed by the task of constructing a world. To prepare a space for you, or maybe to prepare you for what’s already out there. You float in me, in want of nothing, obvious to the evening news… Oblivious to all the stolen girls, the bounty of heartache.”  Such theory is the dignity and honesty of experiencing life: “I sit on the floor and select what I can to urge you forward without falsehood. Here is the colour green. Here is the delayed tang of cranberries on the tongue”.

To mother is to inhabit the task of a poet: to be fully present in the senses, elements, the everyday, the capacity to observe, to notice the difference between the poet and its subjects, and to acknowledge that there is awe, risk, and beauty in reaching for the space between. This insight is humbling and startling. Many readers would feel home within Sze’s work.