Coral Road: Poems

by Garrett Hongo

Garrett Hongo’s long-awaited third collection of poems is a beautiful, elegiac gathering of his Japanese-American ancestors in their Hawaiian landscape and a testament to the power of poetry, as it brings their marginalized yet heroic narratives into the realm of art.

In Coral Road Hongo explores the history of the impermanent homeland his ancestors found on the island of O‘ahu after their immigration from southern Japan, and meditates on the dramatic tales of the islands. In sumptuous narrative poems he takes up strands of family stories and what he calls “a long legacy of silence” about their experience as contract laborers along the North Shore of the island. In the opening sequence, he brings to life the story of his great-grandparents fleeing from one plantation to another, finding their way by moonlight along coral roads and railroad tracks. As his grandmother, a girl of ten with an infant on her back, traverses “twelve-score stands of cane / chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind,” Hongo asks, “Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of this history?” In fact, it is Hongo who guides himself—and us—as, in these devoted acts of recollection, he seeks to dispel the dislocation at the center of his legacy.

The love of art—making beauty in however provisional a culture—has clearly been a guiding principle in Hongo’s poetry. In this content-rich verse, Hongo hearkens to and delivers “the luminous and the anecdotal,” bringing forth a complete aesthetic experience from the shards that make up a life.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not connect with these poems.  I think they are beautiful and emotional, but somehow I was unable to untangle their meaning. The failing is entirely mine.

From an interview with the author:

I wrote “The Wartime Letters of Hideo Kubota” and “The Art of Fresco” sections of CORAL ROAD to address how two different generations of Japanese Americans experienced the same historical event–WW II–one as a DOJ detainee in Arizona and the other as an American soldier in Italy.  I wrote the other two sections–“Coral Road” and “A Map of Kahuku in Oregon” as my own personal responses to the immigration history and my feelings of descent and legacy from all these histories.  Some want to know about style, voice, the so-called “craft” issues.  These aren’t that much at issue for me, as I’ve practiced poetry for a good while now and have a lot of those things worked out.  In essence, though, I’d have to say that I think I’ve developed a style that takes narrative structures derived from the historical archive of dramatic monologues (mainly in English, but also in translations from Dante’s Italian, Virgil’s and Ovid’s Latin, and the Japanese of Zeami Motokiyo).  It also derives its imagistic style from Pound’s Chinese and Anglo-Saxon translations in CATHAY.  The long line I worked at a good, long while and might have affinities with the verse paragraph of Wordsworth, the conversation poems of Coleridge, and Derek Walcott’s iambics.  It’s more vague to me how I came up with it, but it’s not Whitmanic as so many critics have claimed.  My teachers have helped me develop an ear–all of them–but I think the style and voice are all my own.

What did it take to develop this style?  Many years of practice so that it’s how I “hear” any poem I compose.  It’s the muse.

Note that the gorgeous cover photo is a photo by the author, and is described in the final poem of the collection, "Elegy."



Kawela Studies
Drizzle of rain pattering on the dwarf palms, dark towers and blue parapets of clouds
Over the ruffled blue gingham of the sea, sweet scent of seawrack and fresh life
                                                                                                                borne on the wind
That ambles along the sands and sticks of drift like a nosing poi dog
Wigwagging from the lava rock point along this thin scythe of a beach …

I'm home again, curling waves tossing their soaked white tresses to the skies,
Dropping them tendrilously around my ankles in a dancer's expert tease,
Pipers scooting like feathered gray race-cars accelerating ahead,
The shark’s fin-and-tail in the surf the first plainsong of the morning,
Gloria of the bobbing turtle just offshore the second.

I came here once when I was nineteen and near fully a Mainland kid by then,
Slept shrouded on the beach in a GI-surplus mosquito net,
smoked Camels and Marlboros
Days playing cards with cousins — nickel bets, peanuts, and pidgin all in the mix —
Dripping bottles of Primo beer our cold drink, raw fish salad our chaser.

Winter vacation sophomore year, I'd brought a blue Sears suitcase
                                                                                                filled only with books —
Joyce, Beckett, Kawabata, Tillich, and Buber. Novels and baby theology.
I found something in them that drew an ache out of my heart,
Poultices of words, pharmakoi of pages flecked with angelic particles of sand,
As I read madly on the beach, dawn to dusk, frigate birds and gulls
Squawking overhead like schoolmates inviting me to leave studies behind
And sail with them in the gay, gusting winds, seek Amaryllis in the shaded seas.

But the most I would do was plunge in the surf when it got too hot,
Then stroke out past the shorebreak to the dark ribbon of reef
                                                                                               a hundred yards out.
Along the way, warm waters would be sieves with the cool

From freshwater springs coming through the lagoon’s sandy bottom.
I’d catch gray glimpses of mullet schools, yellow tangs, and eel-like,
                                                                                             spotted hīnālea  —
Wrasses furling amid green corals and tentacles blooms of white anemones.
And, if I flipped myself over like the contrarian seal, disporting on my back
And wanting to wail with the unsayable, I didn’t know how to,
Except that aching had turned to resolve, the sun’s scorn to imperative suggestion
As I floated along, catching my breath, feeling the wind’s cool fingers
Tantalize along my trunks and wet skin of my arms and hairless chest.

Signature of all things I am here to read, thought Joyce’s Daedalus,
Channeling Plato,  himself derived from Heraclitean mystics
And yet their proud, sophistic apostate.
                                                            Unlike them, I had a place but no stories,
No tradition except utter silence like the deeps that fell away offshore,
Sixty feet to sixty fathoms in a breath.  What was there was more than mystery,
The dropoff past unportrayed even in lore and without unisonance,
The luminous and anecdotal cloaked in inky shrouds, absent my own conjured romances

And yet the ache stayed, as if all the slate sky was a stone’s weight on my chest,
Pressing me down beneath the waves for truth and a confession,
Pressure of the unspoken shorting my breath until vision and the epiphanic
Might distinguish themselves from delirium, sunshowers over the opened seas
An amber dazzle to the left of my rolling shoulder as I shrugged quickly over
And bean my measured strokes back to the daedal shore.

[Victoria & David Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although well done I preferred his first two volumes.