Night Sky with Exit Wounds
by Ocean Vuong
Genres: PoetryPages: 89
Rating:
Synopsis:An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.
Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a rare book of poetry I’ve actually heard about/seen around elsewhere, rather than stumbling across. I’ve heard it might work a bit better if you’ve read Vuong’s other work, but I haven’t, so I came to this cold.
And… left it pretty cold, unfortunately; there are some amazing images, some sharp sentences, but the overall effect just… didn’t quite come off for me. Some of the poems felt scattered, disjointed, and not necessarily intentionally so: I just couldn’t follow the train of thought, or in a couple of cases, simply didn’t care to.
Some beautiful language, that can’t be denied, but not my thing stylistically.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
I felt similarly, although I will try his other collection as well. Some of the poems are good but a lot of them were confusing or unengaging and I ended up not caring enough to dive deeper. I will say that I tried listening to the other collection as an audiobook (he narrated it himself) and couldn’t get past the first poem – I don’t enjoy how he reads his poems (which is probably an indication that the poem isn’t for me, I guess, since surely the rhythm the poet reads it in is the ‘correct one’)…. but I’m more hopeful about his prose – I definitely want to try one of the novels he’s written at some point.
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Not all writers are good readers of their work, so there is that… but it’s not a very promising sign!
Oddly enough, I read “Time Is A Mother” recently, and it was the only collection of contemporary poetry that I actually didn’t feel utterly uninterested in, even if I still feel I don’t “get” contemporary poetry. But I think one of the things that appealed to me was its very inaccessibility and disjointedness, and the constant uncertainty about what was memoir, and what was metaphor, and what was perhaps pastiche of others’ experiences, if that makes any sense. Whereas I also tried one of your favourite poets recently and was left bored and cold. Poetry! What the heck?!
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A lot of my long-standing favourites are ones that I ended up liking only after studying them, and didn’t always “get” first try, which sometimes makes me think I should spend a lot longer with poetry before coming to any conclusions… but, even when I do, it’s hard to replicate the experience of being one of 20 undergraduates someone’s setting to work on discussing a poem together. I like poetry best of all when I have been forced to work for it, I think, and I suspect Vuong’s poetry would be a fertile field for that.
(I do suspect that the same experience of having to work to extract meaning and significance with a group of 19 other eager undergraduates has given depth to poems that don’t really have it, but that’s art for you.)