The Prismatic Spaces between Lines
Review of Gillian Sze, Quiet Night Think
by Mackenzie Pereira
What drives the creative process? To answer this question, Gillian Sze’s newest collection of essays and poems points us skyward to the age-old symbol of the moon. Named in homage of a translation of a famous poem by Li Bai, Quiet Night Think meditates on the nature of liminal spaces, the cycle of life, and the aspects of the human condition that remain culturally immutable.
The life experiences that she has compiled have been chosen with precision. They are all instances of silent growth and are, if one is willing to draw water between words, universal. Sze’s poems are laced with animations of abstractions created by nature, and her essays layer relatable experiences about Canadian immigrant identity.
When the grey rain lingers, go out and buy vegetables./
Handpick lotus roots and winter melon. Drag your brimming
trolley home. (11)
Sze draws inspiration from the scarcity of Chinese poetry. She notes how the spaces between lines are prismatic. “To translate from a language that typically removes articles and pronouns is no simple task” (2). Uncertainty can allow for refraction, for light to be shed on multiple surfaces of thought. The desire for understanding motivates creative thinking; longing carries us from one unknown to the next.
Sze navigates from the subject of writing to yet another creative process: pregnancy.
After giving birth, it is customary in Chinese culture for a woman
to spend one month housebound in order to recover from the
rigours of labour … In my dialect, Hokkien, this practice goes by
another term that translates to “within the month.” My preferred
understanding of this hazy newborn period is that the mother is,
more accurately, “sitting inside the moon.” (37)
As Sze’s priorities soon dissolve in place of those of her newborn, the question arises: do we own our creations, or do they own us? How can distance act as a tether, a lifeline? Autobiographically likening new motherhood to an orbital motion about a planet, Sze writes:
It is a state marked not only by the celestial soothing and nursing
a newborn at all times of the night, but also the sheer lunacy of
those early days. (37)
This collection is an invitation for contemplation. It draws attention to the strength of implicitness, how change – dissolution, even – and the quiet reflection thereafter are essential rituals to make room for creation. Readers looking for a space to reflect will feel at home in the room that Sze has created with her collection.
Sitting in the moon is a transformation. You come out of it no
longer the same person and no longer the same poet. (46)
Works Cited
Sze, Gillian. Quiet Night Think: Poems and Essays. Toronto: ECW Press, 2022.
Mackenzie Pereira is a fourth-year B.Sc. student at McGill University, with a major in Physics and a minor in English Literature. She has completed an internship at CERN (2021), held an NSERC undergraduate research award (2022), and is currently an editor for the McGill Science Undergraduate Research Journal.
31 May 2023