Time Is a Mother
- Apr 16, 2024
- 2 min read
★★★☆☆
Ocean Vuong is a name that was orbiting my periphery for awhile before I’d done anything to bring us closer (beyond having his books on my reading list). On a roundtrip to Kansas City sometime in the past couple of months, I listened to Krista Tippett’s interview with Vuong on her On Being podcast. I was moved by the sensitivity, the curiosity, and the emotional honesty with which he observes the world and inhabits his own life. When I got back to town, I went straight to the library and checked out a handful of books, including the only Vuong title on the shelf, Time is a Mother.
Book in hand, I immediately thought of the double meaning behind the title: We are, in many ways, raised as much by time as we are by the people who did the rearing; and that time, or at least the myriad ways in which time affects us, is, in fact, a motherfucker. Age and loss and death, and the grief that comes along with that inevitable process, both from a deeply personal perspective but also in a broader, more societal context is largely what Vuong is concerned with in this, his second volume of poetry.
Because I stopped writing poetry in my early mid-twenties and didn’t pick it up again until my late mid-forties (read: about 25 years), I have no idea what kind of writer I would have been in my mid-thirties had I kept on. There is a naïvete to Vuong’s writing here that I recognize in my younger self. This is by no means meant to be a comparison, only that I’m fifteen years older than he his and not all of his youthful vigor and its corresponding themes resonate with me. How I see myself or the world or my place in it at fifty has little in common with how I saw those things at thirty-five, let alone how I’d capture my thoughts about it all. But his explorations of loss, of disconnection, of identity, of violence, of searching for meaning amidst grief, and the powerful and evocative turns of phrase he crafts, and the freedom, the joyful abandon with which he writes is both inspiring and deeply moving—even if the result was often akin to biting into something delicious that aroused all the senses while on the palette but did not linger in the mind once swallowed.
I do wish I’d started with Vuong’s first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and the novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that preceded it to see how, or whether, Time is a Mother sits beside those other works. Mother’s dust jacket reads, “These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form …,” which is, I hesitate to ponder (and then distinguish), perhaps what the kids are into; whereas me: not so much. Therein lies the (slightly) tortured nature of this review. For the most part, the bones are all there, it’s just that sometimes they’re festooned in ways that detract, rather than amplify, the message.
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