Caroline Colantonio

Phoebe Wang, WAKING OCCUPATIONS

Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2022. $19.95

I spent every night for a week reading and returning to poems from Waking Occupations. The dimension in which Phoebe Wang paints time and place in language is dreamlike and enthralling. This book is remarkably great; it destabilizes fundamental notions of past and future to uncover a continuous perspective. It’s also a necessary reminder of the utility of artworks as cultural guideposts for generations to come. I could flip through its pages and easily find a technical monument.
Broken into four sections that move freely through history, Waking Occupations opens with aubades that consider onerous commitments, outdated absolutes, and hard-won truths. The second and third sections are meditative still lives and brief encounters with practical objects, places, and art. Wang’s careful ekphrastic constructions draw from affecting memories that reverberate to suggest the shape of their legacy. The final section contains elegies that consider what we’ve lost as complicit citizens on occupied lands, and how we might move through our looming future.
The final poem in the first section, “for the Immune,” is one of my favourites. Wang writes: “The trick is, how to be patient as a window. / Numb on one side, compensating on the other, / double-paned, with a vacuum of air in between.” The speaker’s effort is palpable as she is unable to shut out the beauty of nature at the poem’s turn. Throughout the book, the poet remains split—“neither here nor there,” and unwilling to rest despite the challenges of resistance. She travels beyond the constraints of chronology, the painting style of “Old Masters,” and the “stitches we put in the earth.” Wang’s revolutionary vision doesn’t stem from just one side of the window’s pane.
As Wang’s poems enter paintings, sculptures, and exhibits, we are privy to piercing details that infuse vitality into tired notions of acceptance and surface encounters. I especially love the attention she pays to family. In “Still Life for the Myth of Origins,” Wang quotes a French song called “Parlez-moi d’amour” that she imagined her young mother may have heard her grandfather playing on vinyl. It’s an unforgettable stroke of storytelling that leads us quietly into the scene and leaves us listening to lyrics we can’t yet fully comprehend. In the arresting “Brief Encounter at the Greenwich Meridian,” Wang writes: “I wanted to start from zero / But no matter where I start, there is always / a disclosure I can’t make visible.” Here she attempts to account for the trouble with forgetting that an inherited system is clouded by colonialist smoke. In reading her notes, I learned that Wang incorporated numerous resource materials into her commentary, including a warrant from King Charles II to the Astronomer Royal, lyrics from a 1745 sailor song, the Treaty of Nanking, and the Longitude Act of 1714. She uses language from these historical relics to reveal the problem with “singleness over multiplicity.” She raises an unforgiving mirror to the shadows that linger on dividing lines when we attempt to “fram[e] our occupations in terms of profit margins and winnings.”
Through Wang’s eloquent excavations, we are gifted with a path to cyclical renewal through the acts of creating and waking. In the tercets of “Still Lives,” Wang walks us through a 1991 family trip to view Claude Monet’s Water Lilies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She writes, “In the gallery of memory, / there are no neutral colours. / Only one visitor is admitted at a time.” As she peels back layers of her own history as a first-generation Chinese-Canadian, Wang visits a time in her life, offering “lessons in shade and tone and value,” using quotes from her parents, expositions of tradition, and adventures with her sister. With her beautiful final lines, the poet frames her younger self directed into place for a photograph with the weight and opportunity of hindsight. In “Without Inheritances,” Wang writes: “I have made things without knowing how I held that knowing,” reflecting aside a memory of travelling to her grandfather’s funeral with her mother. She asks, “It is said that ghosts cannot follow you over water though how can I know?” There is no way to occupy spaces with only our own definitions. Wang reminds me we are part of a lineage that extends far beyond our vantage points. It’s the ceremonies of her ancestors and flowers growing by the river that ultimately serve as soothing medicines.
The night I finished the last poem in this book, I composed the beginning of a song I’ve been looking for the courage to write for several years. That is one example of what these poems can inspire inside of you. Wang’s words are generative and generous, and I know Waking Occupations will take root in every person who has the privilege of reading it.