A Review of Amy Uyematsu’s Stone Bow Prayer

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

A Review of Amy Uyematsu’s Stone Bow Prayer




Amy Uyematsu’s Stone Bow Prayer (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) is an intriguing study in structure in that it employs the Chinese lunar calendar to organize the collection.   Stone Bow Prayer is also Uyematsu’s third poetry collection after 30 Miles from J-Town (Story Line Press, 1992) and Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain (Story Line Press, 1998).  Uyematsu is further known for co-editing Roots: An Asian-American Reader, considered by many to be the “first” Asian American themed anthology.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Roots has not received the kind of attention that Aiiieeeee! has generated over the last couple of decades.  Of course, Roots also diverged from Aiiieeeee! based upon a more concentrated focus on poetic selections and excerpts, a genre almost completely absent from the other collection.  Given Uyematsu’s early interest in Asian American poetics, her third poetry collection, Stone Bow Prayer does include influences of what might be termed activist poetics, but there are much more elements to consider in her aesthetics which traces feminist politics, the Japanese American internment, racial self-abjection, and the post-9/11 milieu.  By structuring the collection under the 12 months of the lunar calendar, but also employing the Japanese names for those months, Uyematsu is also able to mobilize a different set of themes within each section.  In this respect, there is a kind of poetic coherence to her work.  That Uyematsu employs an alternative temporal marking system does shift the way in which she clearly wants her work to be perceived.  That is, the poetry collection still operates in some ways with the intention of highlighting different and varied subject positions. 

In “What Doesn’t Die,” Uyematsu considers the ways in which specific racialized features might be reconceived.

The eyes passed on to me could only belong to an island
of such rare beauty, an accident of rock and fire rising out of
the cold Pacific to become this land grown lush with green,
still constantly fed from rain and stream and ocean mist.
Around any curve of our coastline there’s a pine forest
or waterfall, a sculptured cliff or cypress to greet us.
For as long as we can remember, everywhere we looked
was stunning.  Small wonder that our eyes
narrowed permanently, turning up at the ends as we laugh
with delight.  Only natural that my tribe would name
our members stone, valley, river, mountain tree (41). 

There is an interesting move here in which the genetic traits passed on to the speaker becomes more widely acknowledged through the appearance of the “we” who exists in this poem as “tribe.”  The beauty found all around Japan, whether it be from the foliage or the majestic vistas created from erosion, the speaker considers “Asiatic” ocular features to result from “delight” at so much visual stimulation.  The effectiveness of this poem lies in its focus on concrete images, clearly situating the reader in Japan.  Such a poem can be placed up against “The Fold” in which self-imposed racial abjection appears in the form of cosmetic surgery, specifically the creation of the epicanthic fold not common to many East Asians:

Even simpler than reducing a nose
or rewiring a smile: it takes
one quick hour to reshape the eye,
just a tiny incision,
bigger and rounder eyes growing more
common on both Pacific shores.

As long as most Asian women are born
missing this extra feature, doctors
like my uncle always have business,
five lid operations a week,
five times $3,500 will make everyone happy,
a popular gift from parents to daughters” (47).

What is interesting about this particular poem is that the lyric speaker, who we might understand to be a potential double for the author, has an uncle who participates in this business.  In a certain sense then, there is a profit being made by Asian Americans through cosmetic surgery which purports to make the Asian American woman look more “Western.”  Further, that parents are involved in this process through gift-giving increases the irony that Asian Americans participate in their own racial self-abjection by catering to the normative standards of “Western” beauty.  Whereas Japan as a geographical landscape is clearly delineated in the previous poem, here the United States exists as a obscured surgical location, devoid of certain concrete markers.  Both poems showcase Uyematsu’s rather accessible lyrics, which stand in contrast to the other vein of Asian American poets that borders on the experimental and avant-garde. 

“Simple Division” calls attention to the mathematical nature of the collection, a characteristic already grounded in the structure of the Chinese lunar calendar:

My history echoes
from small diameters—

120,000 issei and nisei
divided among 7 states

equals 10 barbed-wire
desert prison camps. 

In “The Fold,” the lyric speaker states exactly how much money is made through eyelid operations.  Likewise, “Simple Division,” ironically considers the ways in which Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and sent to internment camps.  The arbitrary and racist nature of these events is considered first through the word “simple” as if to suggest that this mathematically grounded solution would actually provide the United States with a sense of homeland security.  The form of the poem is interesting in that it employs enjambed two-line stanzas that seem to evoke the division apparent in the content of the poem.  Three stanzas with two lines and yet this geometrical symmetry reverberates against the horrors of what is being conveyed.

In “Unexpected Passage,” the lyric speaker grapples with a hysterectomy:

I can’t decide whether to celebrate or cry.
For thirty-five years I took it all for granted—
never questioned my fertility, the female
power to grow a child inside me.
I want to claim this round,
empty belly I’ve become. 

This section from which “Unexpected Passage” comes generates a larger feminist politic related in the collection in which various female figures face problematic challenges and obstacles.  Here, the very definition of bodily femininity is placed into question when the lyric speaker must face the fact that she will not be able to bear a child.  This characteristic seems to be the epitome of the way she considers herself to be a woman and so the loss of her uterus exists as an incredible alienation from her own body.  An earlier poem, “Always Eleven,” explores the intricacies of a girl’s adolescence and the lack of sexual knowledge she was given as a young Japanese American girl.  This failure to acknowledge sexual maturation strikes as a trauma that renders the lyric speaker trapped in that moment.

The “Flowering Eye” mobilizes Uyematsu’s post-9/11, anti-war rhetoric:

The bombing won’t stop but we’re not as fragile as we fear
especially when those faces of anguish an ocean away
can be switched on and off with the evening news
the stage cleared away for a feast of orchids
hundreds in April bloom as we
gorge ourselves on the delicate hues
the stillness of moving water nearby. 

All through the war we’ll be patient as gardeners
obliterate a memory that can blossom at spring (99).

This poem engages the flippancy of the American public who might be said to operate with an “out of sight, out of mind” policy in which one can indulge in the “feast of orchid/ hundreds in April bloom” as others around the world face conflict and death.  The final couplet “All through the war we’ll be patient as gardeners/ obliterate a memory that can blossom at spring” (99) de-familiarizes the nature of growth and fertility as a site of beauty.  Instead, the ways in which certain images can simply be discarded like weeds generates a culture of ignorance that is at-stake in this poem.  Uyematsu’s references to 9/11 appear as a larger thread through Asian American poetics where that event looms as an ordering reference; these works include most notably Genny Lim’s Child of War, Timothy Liu’s Of Dust Thou Art, Meena Alexander’s Raw Silk, and Luisa A. Igloria’s Trill and Mordent.

Amy Uyematsu’s Stone Bow Prayer is an widely-ranging work, tackling personal dilemmas and global conflicts all within its pithy span of approximately 100 pages.  Focused more on lyricisim than on experimentalism, the collection could easily be employed in introductory courses on poetics, Asian American literature, women’s studies among other such organized courses. 

Purchase here:
http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/catalog/dsp_bookDetail.cfm?Book_ID=1239