“Last Day of My Face” by James Shea
James Shea, whose day job is professor at Baptist University, is something of a fixture in the Hong Kong poetry scene. His latest collection Last Day of My Face, however, is published out of Iowa University Press, a result of it having won the Iowa Poetry Prize.
It’s not a long collection, less than 60 pages, and only a few poems reference Hong Kong (or indeed, China or Asia), and readers not up to speed on Hong Kong iconography might not notice the poems that do:
Sometimes when a tram passenger
looks out the window, a companion
places a hand on her shoulder.
The bell dings at the stop.
No one gets off and wind
enters every window of the carriage.
Scaffolding sways around an office building…
Or
There’s a rotating restaurant on top of that building.
Everyone looks up.
It doesn’t seem to be moving, are you sure?
Yes, I’ve eaten there myself. It moves very slowly.
Everyone looks up again.
Or it could be somewhere else, but people from Hong Kong would likely conclude it’s not.
This hiding of things in plain sight is emblematic of the collection. The poems are (for most part) immediately accessible, on quotidian subjects (trees, old movies, streetlights, insomnia), clever, witty and to the point. “That’s That” starts off
Certain words I dislike.
Ooze. Lozenge. Other words
I love. Katydid. Bumblebee.
before turning its attention to “that”: a pronoun, a conjunction, an adverb, an adjective. “I defer to the sure sense of things”, it continues before twisting, as do many of these poems, in its conclusion: “That’s how I approach catastrophe.”
Poetry in Shea’s hands has us look at the world differently, if not askance:
I confirm
that I am
not a bot…
How many
times a day
do I have
to confirm
that I am
not a bot?
The collection builds toward a long, multi-part poem called “Failed Self-Portrait”, a title which could arguably stand in for the collection as a whole. It is an observant reflection on life and reality.
I want to set life apart
and examine it, consider its particulars,
but I am swept up. Your turning
of these pages blows a wind upon me.
But like most of the poems in the collection, it ends up in an unexpected place.
I’d rather ramble into the fictions.
People are dying before I can even get to them.
Much poetry is not for everyone. Poetry that is for everyone may not be for those that like poetry. Last Day of My Face falls refreshingly in-between.
