A collection of 49 poems of varying forms, from scattered verses to prose poetry, Primordial is more than the sum of its parts. Mai Der Vang, equipped with the eloquence and talent for crafting vivid imagery that had made her previous collection a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, brings together the overlaying experiences of the Hmong people, ravaged and displaced by war, and of the elusive, ethereal, endangered saola, a rare species of bovine with a pair of long sword-like horns that only came to be known and classified in scientific terms in 1992.
The Hmong people and the saola share a geographical home in the mountainous forests between Vietnam and Laos, but their paths rarely cross, given how small and hidden the saola population is. The saola has also historically been hunted by humans, including Hmong people. In an objective sense, there is perhaps little to directly connect their experiences—yet Mai Der Vang’s poetry draws threads beyond time and space to bring them together.
Primordial opens with an encounter in dreams between saola and the subject “I” of the poems, through which the poet marvels at this surreal connection. From this point the poems journey on, section by section, unveiling musings about the saola’s existence before and after it was discovered by science, exploring what it means to be seen, studied, chased, sought after, preserved like an artefact.
In “Camera Trap Triptych”, a three-part poem, each part confined in a rectangular box representative of a picture that humans have captured of saola in 1997, 1998, and 2013 respectively, Mai Der Vang wields her words to capture a transition of attitude. The first picture is a chance encounter, and the saola is the subject that speaks: “There is trace of sudden human who looks.” In the second picture, the rarely seen animal is mythicised by the language of grace and majesty, and its shape admired: “Wall horns to be made in shade of its own splendor.” In the final picture, which confirms that saola has indeed not gone extinct, there is both a taste of hope and wry recognition of how its plight, rather than just a tragedy for the species, has come to symbolize humans’ troubled relationship with nature: “Let appearance be a known scene.” In providing pictures through poetry, Mai Der Vang emphasises the anthropocentric gaze through which we tend to view nature, and creates space for the questioning of this perspective.
The second part of Primordial introduces a symmetry between the Hmong and saola experiences with “Hmong, an Ethnographic Study of Other”. Like the picture poems above, this poem emulates a form of knowledge by appearing as notes jotted down by a researcher under the headings “Head”, “Brain”, “Silver”, “House”, and “Place”, each of which quantifies, classifies, objectifies the Hmong people.
But the parallels do not stop at this shared experience of having agency stripped from them, and they do not stop at symmetries between Hmong people and saola either. New layers are revealed with every page turned, looping personal experiences with communal experiences and more-than-human experiences of the saola and the land itself. In “Forest of Beginnings”, land that is devastated by war “is tucking her babies in”, only to later spring forth, just like how Hmong parents escaped war-torn Vietnam so that their children and grandchildren can live. The poem concludes:
I did not know when I birthed you / that flight had been etched / on our tongues.
I did not know the jungle would / take us / far from home, /
bring us to California with / visions of new dirt and /
the brightest green in our blood.
Mai Der Vang masters the balance between a sense of direction and the spontaneity of thoughts and curiosity.
Rather than being a journey viewed in retrospect with clear turning points, Mai Der Vang masters the balance between a sense of direction and the spontaneity of thoughts and curiosity. For instance, a recurring form of poetry in this collection is the “nodes” scattered throughout the book, in which a line of poetry runs across the page, its phrases separated by horizontal lines like nodes on a timeline, between which interruptions sprout and grow into new lines and dimensions within the poem (as, for example, here).
On top of that, the poems, while they build on a theme or a feeling, they also float from one thought to the next. In “Origin”, a prose poem spanning 13 pages—itself a microcosm of the collection—each page is its own poem focusing on a specific topic. Spilling forth on the first page of this poem is the incredulous but natural vivacity of nurturing a new life in one’s belly, followed a meditation on cosmic existence itself on the second page, then dialling down to existence on an ethnic level on the third, and an internal reflection of one’s perception of existence on the fourth. So the poem goes, thought after thought, moving between themes of existence, extinction, motherhood, survival, identity, healing, and protection. The final point, protection, reflects the protection that a mother offers a child, a descendant offers their heritage, and one species offers another. Somewhere in this stream of thoughts the poet reflects on a comment about the perceived inaccessibility of her language, imbued with her multilingual background, and simultaneously reflects on the difficult question of what accessibility means with respect conservation efforts: “This is about access, / a stretch of [wilderness] meant to keep people out.”
True to this mantra, Mai Der Vang experiments with her words, rhythm, and form in a collection that feels like a stretch of wilderness in and of itself, a space for thoughts to resurface and for Mai Der Vang to skilfully and playfully wield her words, interlacing layer upon layer of meaning. From each page of “Origin”, Mai Der Vang italicises and frames a series of words which at the end come together into its own verse, and the verse has highlighted words that culminates in the final line: “I time orphaned letters of tongues and all Hmong in words are alive.”
Mai Der Vang creates a dreamscape in which time and space collapse.
With every poem through the collection, the connections between experiences that overlay one another become stronger. Words immortalise existence, words bridge the gap between all that has been lived and all that is living—they are the way through which lives encased in this volume can carry one living next to each other, page upon parallel page.
Through resounding language and bold forms that explore what it means to exist and co-exist, to be threatened and to persist, Mai Der Vang creates a dreamscape in which time and space collapse and one experiences the past and the present, the personal and the external, within a single body.
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