Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Essence
By Thuy On
UWAP
Feb 2025, ISBN: 978-1-76080-299-8, $24.99
Thuy On is an arts journalist and critic, and the poetry in Essence reflects this. The mostly short poems are consistently taut, playful, and explore and distill a wide range of artistic referents while examining the whole nature of critique and engagement. The book opens with the title poem which functions as an invocation to both the writer – “spend your words wisely” and the reader “think of waves falling like octaves”, encouraging attention and a different type of perception.
The book is divided into three sections. The first is “Art”, which is mostly ekphrastic, the poems taking inspiration from a broad range of artistic works from theatre to music, literature, ballet, film and a few self-reflexive poems that explore the art of writing. The poetry throughout remains warm and often funny, charged by a thorough understanding of classic and popular art forms and the sometimes strained relationship between them. The first poem is a quite topical list poem that sets out five ambitions for our poet laureate. Given Australia’s impending inaugural poet laureate, the poem feels relevant, and is both tongue-in-cheek and metaphorically apt, playing with notions of what a poet is capable of – both mocking the false grandeur while hinting that there is actually some truth here:
5. Haiku hung aloft every street lamp
elegies sung by honeyeaters with golden bells
a choral cantata to rouse the sunken. (“If I were Poet Laureate: a mandate”)
Many of the poems in this section play with the literary canon, bringing together classic characters from different books and plays, combining their plots in a way that feels just a bit subversive, while also paying homage, recognising that most readers will know who they are reading about:
The six characters looking in vain for their author
Run into Estragon and Vladimir on the kerb
And through Willy’s wares are rejected home to home
Nora’s door slamming is heard the world over. (“Get Lit Again (with one Aussie cameo”)
A variety of forms and styles are used, such as the concrete poem that forms Willy Loman’s (from Death of a Salesman) briefcase in “Deflation”, the dancing words of “Free style poem as interpretative dance”, the Cento-like poem “The Walk”, created from The Cure’s song titles, or the funny little haiku of “Twelve classic texts” that fully embody condensation invoked by the book’s title while also leaning into the fact that you can’t really distill book like Frankenstein into three lines:
Quilt of living parts
goes monstering in the village
just looking for love. (“Frankenstein, Mary Shelly”)
The section ends with a very relatable and funny take on rejection. On is particularly adept at gently poking fun at the literary establishment while also revealing something more broadly true – the lived experience of a person who fully understands the world she is working in:
Dear writer, we’re sorry but we can’t give individual feedback on manuscripts proffered, suffice to say we realise a chapter in that it wasn’t a gutsy crime fiction set in a small rural town starting a substance-abusing former cop who’s back to settle a debt, hook up with his childhood darling and find redemption. So we stopped reading (“If rejection slips were honest”)
As you would expect, the second section of the book, “Heart”, explores love and relationships. Many of the poems in this section continue with the distinctive combination of wry humor contained by the poems in the first section, but these also contain an undertone of grief combined with a deep sensuality. There is always a literary spin. Even the sexiest affair is a kind of reading:
give yourself over to me
glide and ride and
learn the alphabet of my body
conjugate me verbally (“Sensitivity reading”)
As with the first section, the poems in “Heart” employ a range of forms, utilising repetition, rhythm and forms like Villanelle, Haiku and list poems. The poems are as sonically playful as they are semantically so, sometimes suggesting the cadence of performance:
this is hardcore
this is closed door
this is time whore
this is iron claw (“Whirligig Days”).
Seduction, ranked at only two stars, is found wanting, and love is just another form of language:
negative space between my ribs
coordinates misplaced
mute in dialects of loss (“(A)part”)
As with the previous section, “Heart” ends with a list poem, “13 ways of looking at love”, a nod to Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. The poem is sad, sweet and also funny, playing off literary tropes while using modern imagery like catcalls, the Capcha, and dating apps in a way that is both fresh, while still evoking the beauty of its referent: ‘’13. Blackbird against snow: my hair on your pillow.”
The final section, “A La Carte” is a mix of poems on different topics from the environment, language, and identity. A number of the poems in this section are self-referential and engage with the language process itself, exploring in an almost anthropomorphic way, the impact of different parts of the English language, vowels, consonants, punctuation and sentence structure, and pronouns:
The first person pronoun
so ramrod in bearingmistress of her domain
with main character energy (“Herstory”)
There is a set of poems “To be a performative Asian” and “Fake Asian” which hark back to the “I don’t love you any time” poem in “Art” written as a critique of the musical “Miss Saigon”. These pieces form a hard-hitting group that engages with notions of racism, code-switching, and the flawed norms of life in Australia in a way which contrasts perfectly with the wry humour in this section:
are you eggshell-coloured, ecru, dove-grey?
all those smudgy off-white tones (“To be a performative Asian”)
Many of the other poems in this section are lighter, including a laugh-out-loud unpunctuated prose poem about being lost in Ikea. The prose in this poem perfectly mirrors the particular breathlessness that anyone who has been in the big Tempe store in Sydney (or any Ikea anywhere) will immediately recognise:
I reckon we’ve passed that Kivik three times remember that sage or is it khaki ottoman on the right of the Liatorp that everyone covets and the dumpy lumpy Parup found in all the share houses the ever existed we need to double up back trace to the beginning near the stegosaurus plushes bypass the fine pier ensemble of the arrows…(“Lost in IKEA”)
The short poems throughout Essence work perfectly for the discrete subject matter and are easy to read, but the simplicity belies the depth of this work or the way it interrogates language and the impact it has. Readers will enjoy the many literary references and links throughout the book, and the way in which On collates external sources with a sensual framework. Essence is a pleasure to read, beautifully written, funny and often deeply moving.