by Conor Mc Donnell

1. Barbara Tran’s Precedented Parroting (Anstruther Books imprint, Palimpsest Press) collects 23 poems across six sections. The number 23 is of course a happy number because the sum of the squares of its digits resolve to one (i.e., 2² + 3²= 13 => 1² + 3² = 10 => 1² + 0² =1). It is also the number of chromosomal pairs that store all our genetic material. Each pair splits to combine with the chromosomal counterparts of mates, spouses, beloveds, etc. and something new is born: us but not us, mostly us but a little bit other too. The poems in this book feel at times like a chromosome – split, expectant, a pirouette waiting to take flight.

2. The introductory quotes are provided by Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and an African Grey Parrot called Alex. From these the following words stand out as enigmatically prescient of what’s to come: birds, language, music, colour (Tran’s spelling, presumably after consulting Alex; my preferred spelling too). Each of these four words is a vector in the graphic plot above and their presence (or prompting) in each of the book’s six sections are represented relative to each other in time and space.

3. The back-cover blurb states, ‘Opening with an exit …’, yet the opening poem, Raven Takes Wing, opens with:

‘The first step is admitting it:        I am a willful forgetter

                                        (I’ve taken this step many times)’

To this reader, those lines feel less like an exit and more like a departure, tipping notes of incline and descent that ping like over-calibrated motion sensors set throughout this fine collection. Maybe, the poem itself is the exit as later lines like: my memory  /   the one I keep trying to send into flight further develop a sense of escape and motion as two disparate concepts come together to deliver a hybridized third thesis, one of exit as both initiation and continuation – an evolution of sorts. 

4. I believe reviews should be qualified. What do I ‘like’ and what have I recently read? I admit I am one of those consumers who logs books and films on mobile applications. I rate the films but not the books and each has its own bulging wish list. In 2023, I read a paltry 11 books of poetry; however, one of those was the 400+ page FSG Anthology, and two were Ciarán Carson translations (the epic Irish-language poem, An Táin, and, Dante’s Inferno). The fact that Precedented Parroting is only my fifth poetry collection of the year to date should therefore not induce consternation; the year is young and the Spring launches are still in full swing. I would also add that after attending Tran’s reading from this book (alongside Cassidy MacFadzean at Queen Books) I requested to review Precedented Parroting and have read it sloooowly from cover to cover, a few pages each day, four times in preparation for this review. In the process of doing so, new ideas (Tran’s), errors (mine), and resistance of recency bias rewarded me with a reading experience I wish for everyone. There are many, too many, books out there and one tries to pay each the courtesy of reading the work while simultaneously handicapping (golf not disability) one’s ability to commit time and concentration enough to get the most out of the best on offer. Last year, I resolved to read less books, less pages, and instead concentrate closely on what appeals to me most. Narrative Based Medicine is built on twin-pillars of close listening and reflective thinking: this is also how I choose to read. When it comes to reviews, I approach the exercise as if it’s the only thing I will write this week, and maybe the only work I publish this year.

5. In addition to those four words from the introductory quotes (birds, language, music, colour) there are also many suggestions from the book’s opening poem, Raven Takes Wing. Poe (obv.) and Crow (Ted Hughes’ Crow was the first poetry collection I ever read cover to cover and, for better or worse, has been an influence and invitation for me to follow my own poetry path). Barely up and running, Tran drops the first memorable lines like a nut to be cracked on a rock:

This style of enjambment, precision of separation and spacing, is the helical DNA that winds its way throughout this book. In some hands it would be little more than affectation, in Tran’s it’s a dual-purpose instrument that evokes music while performing surgery – sometimes delicate sometimes not – especially in later sections when exposing memories of an absent and somewhat chimeric father.

Almost immediately after those early lines, comes tumbling down one of my favourite moments:

*Other things that occur upon initial reading of the opening poem:

‘regulate’ me. Often, when I read too quickly I trip or zone-out until I realize I should go back, start again slow down and better sync myself with the writer. It’s an inverse decompression sickness in descending too quickly but not to worry, for Tran’s intelligent design and manipulation of space provides platforms on which to pause, take a breath and contemplate. This equalization is a symbiotic rhythm established between reader and writer,

8. A word about taking one’s time. Precedented Parroting is Barbara Tran’s debut collection. A collection some twenty years in the making. Her chapbook, In the Mynah Birds’ Own Words, was winner of the inaugural Tupelo Press chapbook award as far back as 2002. Tran has published poems in both The New Yorker (2006) and The Paris Review (2021) and in the seven or eight lines that exist above the pay line for Paris Review, no changes have been made between then and now. In the five-word single line visible above The New Yorker’s high-watermark, there is one change, the removal of a comma. Tran has been involved in multiple collaborative projects over the years, many of them high-profile in film, and however much the 21 years between chapbook and this collection represent an act of refining, reimagining or irregular re-visiting, only the writer can tell. Nevertheless, the end-product suggests there is much to be said for reflection, patience and waiting for the right editor to come along.

9. On my first reading, I marked the section that contains both those published poems (Section 4) as a ‘weak section’, but I’m not sure I know why anymore. On second reading (and long before I googled the writer’s older publications, I marked Imaginary Menagerie (the New Yorker poem) as, “excellent. One would never think of La Jetée without the notes at the end of the book. The poem stands out from the collection at large because it makes me question whether I am listening to a single voice or a chorus; could this be a central question to Precedented Parroting, and if so, regardless, is Tran the only singer on show?” Knowledge of the influence of La Jetée on this poem reminds us that Section 4 begins with a poem called Rules of the Game, (en Francais, Les Regles de Jeu, another classic of French film). Have I wandered unwittingly into French-Vietnamese territory, or have my eyes been half-closed all along? Subsequently, beside Model Rival: A Lullaby, I jotted down, “nothing wrong with this poem either but maybe this section is a transition, a tentative stretch toward Section 5 (Ba, father), one of the strongest sections in the book.” Arriving at the Paris Review publication, Sonnet for a Sharp-Toothed Dreamer, I wrote the following in the margins: “one sonnet in a 90-plus page collection is one sonnet too many”, “For want of a comma earlier in this book now they all arrive in a single-poem?”, “why do I have to look up five words in 14 lines?’ and, ridiculously, “Does this poem work? No.” To recap, the poems that editors of international renown chose to publish did not particularly appeal to me on first and subsequent readings. To add to it all, I placed a huge question work through Atmospheric River (collides with migraine), the poem that some combination of press, writer and editor chose to excerpt for the publication’s press announcement. This poem closes Section 4. Subsequent re-readings may allow me some insight, understanding, tolerance, whatever you want to call it but, for this reader at least, I am pulled out of what the book was before I reached this section. And maybe that’s the point. Or, maybe, it’s a source of great turbulence for the writer too. Either way, it’s a section jammed with ‘greatest hits’ that jars before a section rooted in absence, deserts and unreliable memories.

10. But first, a word. Blue. Blue is everywhere. It’s all over the cover. Even the whites of the cover are an aqua-white. The only parts of the cover not blue are green and yellow lettering. Tran tells us, there is no blue pigment in blue feathers. We also learn, In Vietnamese there is no specific word for blue It shares the same name as green. This was maybe my earliest hint of intersection and overlap, and their shared importance in fostering not only flight but also perception, camouflage, disguise. Later, in the title poem:

In my dream I have a blue head … In my blue head I am crashing which means I was flying.

Is this blue head an unseen head, or one indistinguishable from others? Fiery red background is brought into the mix along with thuds in the distance: a war is echoed. Is the poet at once outside themselves and in their head? Are they something or somewhere else? When they are red and orange instead of blue, are they flame instead of feather, whip instead of wing? In the absence of blue, how does one make do?

11. Blue Loon, you left me standing alone. Loon Song (Section 1), that bird-word always puts me in mind of A Place in the Sun, that kiss, and the deed that precedes it. Take a moment to listen to the loon. Then Tran’s lines:

The loon can yodel, wail, hoot and tremelo. In the margins of Loon Song I wrote, “I’m not supposed to sit and cry, to close the book and be a ‘thinker’. I should go into the world with these questions and the resolve to find some answers.”

12. Deserving a chromosome all its own, Loon Song, contains a wonderful image:

          

13. What makes a poem good? Not, what makes a good poem. In Loon Song, (yes, again) there is a moment We are inventive with our torture just past halfway (p. 20), where Tran jump-cuts from loon to swinging fists in a cage to grasping bars with your hands or beak. Mirrored reflections give the illusion of space and delightful company as the reader is ushered from observing the awkward flight of solitary loon to sitting side by side with the author in a birdcage, in a hive, in a fever, as lifelong believer in karma. The transition is abrupt, like the realization of an unexpected assault, and despite the occasional stumble (including the ending, more of which soon), Loon Song leaves me pondering whether a good poem with a stumble here and there might not be better than a perfect poem, all swan-dive and murmuration but without lasting impact.

14. Speaking of ill-considered, putting the phrases 40 acres and the moon and lynched within three pages of each other is something I was not prepared for. It took me out of the narrative relative to Tran’s background and conjured instead horrific images from loose restrictions on my childhood TV-viewing that I’d rather not have revisited in the context of this collection. Don’t get me wrong: No Chinese No Irish No dogs was a thing, there is a sharing of heritage and wounds to be sure, however, when I read those words I think of black people first, the ugliness of the hive-mind, how little innocence or reason truly matter once the mob gathers momentum, how good people are nowhere to be found when the cry for justice turns to hunger for blood. Full disclosure: I am terrified of the mob coming for me because I know no-one will lift a hand ‘til it’s over. I believe I am not being unnecessarily anxious in this, we can all conjure examples of physicians being tried in the media only to be privately exonerated some years later, their career and reputation destroyed beyond repair.

15. After the lynching, a child is stabbed. Are such examples subgenres of the Parroting in the title? Does the title refer to us all? This comes to me on my fourth and final read (for now): this is not just daughter and family, writer and reader, this is us and has been us for centuries. I despair, because this is true. I do not love this book less, I simply have concerns too.  

16. As per Chromosome 12, other lines I love:

Following on from the there is no blue motif, I love this image because I feel suspended, halfway up and halfway down. I am invisibly flying albeit in the wrong direction from everyone else’s perspective. Suspension and simultaneous tumbling are images that re-appear throughout. In Unframed, the writer’s sisters, in saris, fall out of family photo albums which are arranged in no particular order, many of which cannot be located in time or place and add to a pervading sense of alienation, suspension, caught in the pause between flying and falling. Again, from Unframed:

This calls to me because we Irish have no word for no. Instead, we say ní hea, it is not. If you ask me do I care, I cannot say no, instead I am forced to own the statement in its entirety,

17. Also from Red O,

The cancer note comes from nowhere. It might refer to an ailing father or the person to whom this book is dedicated, I’m not sure. I don’t know so, I’ll go ahead and say it, as with 40 acres and lynched, we should all be cautious of dropping a depth charge then dancing away with

On my way down the peak I took another dog’s poop

Cancer is a country, one with its own morality and rules. We each have our own constitution but outlaw-cancer rips them up, tears through resolve and leaves us in tatters, both patient and provider alike.

18. I am not sure that Tran’s endings are always on the money. Endings can do many things in a poem: tie it up in a bow, pull the carpet from underneath us, leave us right back where we started, and, with skill and care, it feels like nothing has happened, nothing has changed, no mark remains that is not indelible. Other times, endings are not earned, one tries too hard, one tries to impose a shape on the poem that hasn’t developed organically. This may be my only carp with Precedented Parroting: occasionally, Tran doesn’t stick the landing. To quote examples without referencing entire poems does the disservice of absent context so, to reference the ending of a piece I have said much about will hopefully do the trick. The second quote from Chromosome 14 is the ending to the poem Precedented Parroting, one I think is superb. The ending to Loon Song, another poem I greatly admire and have mentioned much, does not serve what comes before (I have imposed my own enjambment here for space’s sake)

                    Fever protects the way madness does  With a swing and a mirror

19. In Blue from a Distance, Tran pulls off that rarest of tricks, the naming of a thing you always knew but never thought before. In describing bird-feathers Tran writes:

A teardrop shape; for days every bird I see brings me back to Blue from a Distance, and I don’t hate the writer for plucking that image from the ether before I could: I never would. I’m grateful Tran caught and pinned it for me to discover on my back-deck sound-tracked by the rhythmic thwack of the woodpecker that has been driving my neighbour to drink for weeks.

20. From Một:

For me, this conjures Displacement. Departures. Journeys. Tran follows and ends the poem:

I don’t know. Do the children of ex-pats feel the same pull of home and parents, both?

I don’t know. I thought Một would translate as mother, instead it means One. Might one feel lonelier with both parents present? Throughout Section 5, Ba: Living Room (Ba = father), revelations occur of names, siblings, birth certificates, photos of deserts seemingly meaning more to a parent than those of his child. Loose photos fall from an album, tumble to the floor and paper over each other. Some flutter up in the writer’s grip and

 

 

This is as unsettling a suspension of self as finding oneself suddenly perched beside the writer in a bird-cage of mirrors and fever. One even wonders whether at some point it was on the cards to include photographs in this book. I think it might have added to the experience as used recently to good effect in Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, or Jim Johnstone’s The King of Terrors. Actually, therein may lie reason enough not to parrot such works. 

 

21. We all have uncertainties of youth, both in the moment and rear-view mirror. On reading

 

my heart cracks a little and a few tears fall. I am not one to sob at death, illness, cancer, etc. but the thought of this thought occurring to Tran: the process that sorrow, trauma, loneliness and displacement could put her in a place where a thought that would never occur to me seems logical in the development of such negatives of her own, is genuinely heart-breaking and one of many acts of bravery (the opposite to flights of fancy) this collection has gifted me.

22. In 1999, #22 was the first human chromosome to be fully mapped. Some referred to it as decoding the first chapter of the book of life. Its functions lie in the workings of the immune system, congenital heart disease, schizophrenia, cognitive delay, birth defects, and several cancers. The word Telos is used throughout the writings of Aristotle. It is the root of the term teleology and refers to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. In short, it equates to goal. Teetering Under Telos (Section 2, page 39) remains the strongest poem since my first reading. Centre-justified with three-words or less per line it opens with:

An early note, ‘could do with a comma,’ seems picky now, and once one gets used to the way Tran’s lines are assembled, broken, repaired, likely over the best part of two decades, we toe the line and walk in step with unfolding images such as

It takes a little work to get used to but it’s not heavy lifting, nor is it demanding anything more of us than ‘walk in my shoes a while.’ Teetering is filled with nature, light, colour, movement, deftness and an assured touch. It carries me like a benevolent current before dropping me at the end with a question

I don’t know

23. It’s not for me to say that Barbara Tran dream-weaved (wove?) this review from some imaginary menagerie in the sun. I would point out though, that early in the book (Section 2) Tran writes:

Do all beginnings open with an exit? Either way, Precedented Parroting closes with:

My final margin-note, page 102, reads: ‘remember to talk more about Crow’, (too late).

My final note, but one: ‘Stuck the most important landing of all.’