A Thousand Crimson Blooms

by Eileen Chong

Eileen Chong’s luminous poetry examines the histories—personal, familial and cultural—that form our identities and obsessions. A Thousand Crimson Blooms is a deepening of her commitment to a poetics of sensuous simplicity and complex emotions, even as she confronts the challenges of infertility or fraught mother–daughter relations. Entwined throughout are questions of migration and belonging. Viewed as a whole, this collection is a field of flowers, aflame with light.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2021

About the author

Eileen Chong was born in 1980, in Singapore. She moved to Sydney, Australia in 2007.

She won the Poets Union Youth Fellowship in 2010 and was an Australian Poetry Fellow for 2011-2012.

She was the poet-in-residence at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney and the Bundanon Trust in 2016.

Her poetry collections are Burning Rice (2012), Peony (2014), Painting Red Orchids (2016), and Rainforest (2018), all from Pitt Street Poetry, Sydney.

Chong writes about food, family, migration, love and loss. The Singaporean-Australian poet Boey Kim Cheng has said that ‘Chong’s work offers a poetry of feeling, rendered in luminous detail and language, alive to the sorrows and joys of daily living.’

Awards & Achievements

Her books have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Anne Elder Award 2012 for a first book, the Australian Arts in Asia Award 2013, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2017, and the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award 2013 and 2017.

Prizes individual poems of Chong’s have shortlisted for include the Ron Pretty Prize 2014, the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2016, and the Australian Book Review‘s Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2015 and 2017. She also longlisted for the University of Canberra’s Vice-Chancellor Award 2014, 2015 and 2016. Her poems are widely anthologised in Australian and international anthologies.

Reviews

[Carly Findlay · Rating 5 out of 5]

CW: death, trying to conceive, miscarriage,

A Thousand Crimson Blooms is a deeply personal collection of poems by Eileen Chong. Eileen is a Sydney based poet, born in Singapore, with Chinese heritage. Eileen is multi-lingual, which is shown in this book.

The book draws on her family and cultural experiences - the relationship and interaction with her mother in Teacher was a stand out poem for me (the pronunciation of “TEAcher” and “Teacher”, over tea was poignant).

It also covers grief - grief around losing a relative, as well as miscarriage.

Eileen’s dearly loved grandmother died last year. Eileen writes of the conversations she had with her grandmother, and the regret of not being able to see her soon before she died, as well as the grief she carries in the days and months following the death.

The poems about fertility and miscarriage are heavy - and so important for other women to read.

Eileen also writes about sex - and I related to the line “I no longer have room for shame” in Cycle.

The four chapters group the poems into themes, and every so often, you need to turn the book on its side to read a poem. I liked this.

While there is a lot of dark, sad content, there is beautiful light and incredible observational details in A Thousand Crimson Blooms.

I devoured this book in one sitting, and was also empowered to write my own.

I love being Eileen’s friend on Twitter - and this book gave me a great insight into her life.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chong offers us several precious insights into her aesthetic practice in this collection. She prefers the tercet, which she subtly enjambs in a way that I sometimes find powerfully surprising and sometimes a bit mysterious — “A mother crosses my path. Her child kicks / a ball over the grass” is a pretty perfect surprise for a collection so consistently concerned with infertility (39) — and she recalls her husband’s comment that “I write poems / in threes: three lines, three pathways. / One for the old life, one for the new // and one for the hours / I do not notice as they pass” (26). Most of her poems have a kind of autobiographical and narrative quality — it makes me want to read a prose poem by Chong, although she seems to have perfected a particular collection of closely related forms here that wouldn’t benefit from being varied for its own sake; it is almost an epic poem in imagistic, delicate tercets and couplets — which means the sentences usually flow seamlessly and like water over the line and stanza breaks of the tercet, granted inherent poetic weight by their only occasional fall into conventional lineation. The tercet itself becomes a motif that serves less to organise the words and more to measure the spillage of language and the circulation of images. Most of all, to teach us that there are three pathways: the old life, the new life, and the invisible life. “I place my hand, / the one that writes, onto its trunk. In the dark / I can feel where it is divided into three: to live / once is not enough. One js born, one must fight, // one will die” (66). That one, however, was a quatrain.

[Sarah]

“When I was six a teacher taped my mouth shut because
my soul kept trying to sing at all the wrong times” (18).

This is the first I have read of Eileen Chong and it will not be the last. Following her on Twitter before the launch of this publication, I had a general idea of who Chong is. Her latest collection only exemplifies her position as a poetic weaver. Chong has an ability to bring magic and community into the smallest of spaces, igniting a sense of hope even amidst loss.

A Thousand Crimson Blooms is a collection of loss and gain. We move through the sections of poetry that gently paint a vision of family and what it can be. Chong is raw with her readers, inviting them into infertility and grief. Even at her most hopeless however, you can sense the ambition and power in her person. Chong is going to make sense of these things and continues to be a source of hope as she explores her own identity in the collection.

“You turn the corner into an entire room
of uteri – watercoloured wombs on wallpaper” (41).

There is love in her work, in her communities. You see how nurturing she is with her grandmother in poems, with her mother too. Chong is a safety-blanket and blessing to the literary world. The way words fabricate within her collection, especially in classes with young ones in poems such as ‘Making Sense’ is enough to tune any heart. It makes me sad, but hopeful as a reader (and sometimes a writer) of poetry, hoping to stitch my own life together as I emerge from academia into adulthood.

“children recite their
times tables: do they all
mark the stars as they fall?” (60)

This is a beautiful collection and a reminder that we are in charge of our homes and can create homes within ourselves, our loved ones, and within words in the universe. Eileen has created something quite special.

“I seek an address, I want to be delivered home” (26).

Some favourites include:

Rainbow, 9
Float, 25
Spring Festival, 26
Prince of Wales Hospital, July 2018, 40
Rot, 49
Firmament, 50
Making Sense, 60
Needle, 63
Sewing Daisies, 64
The Dome, 68

[ALPHAreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

'A Thousand Crimson Blooms' is the latest poetry collection from Australian writer Eileen Chong, published by University of Queensland Press.

This collection is a layering of time and longing. It exists in a liminal space between memory and the present, one triggering the other and then reverberating back to the here and now - before reaching again and deeper into history and poignant memory.

Chong writes with an absolutely sublime touch; precise words and sentences that I can only imagine were painstakingly curated, read feather-light on the page; Denouement of days:

And then sometimes that sparsity screams with a much deeper meaning. Almost skittering a sentence, swerving as though the pain is too deep to linger; I was angry. She was ashamed.

There's so many threads and themes throughout this slim collection, it's amazing what Chong has managed to pack in - and again with that interplay of light touch and staccato hurt. The one that I found spoke to me profoundly was the turning points of mother/daughter relationships, motherhood and infant loss, miscarriage. These are heavy topics and Chong really opens herself up on the page in truly cathartic ways, full of grace.

My mother cannot
craft in art what she never saw in life.

I thought this collection was superb. I always feel better for welcoming poetry into my reading, and sitting with Eileen Chong and this book was a very special experience.

[Tina Dearing · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just wanted a book of poetry written by a person like me, about the things I feel and experience.
I'm no good with words and like it when better people express my emotions for me

I found it here. It took me ages to find but I found it

[riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best poetry collection I have read. I can't believe such a great writer exists. Hope she is happy.

[Jas Shirrefs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eileen always writes so beautifully on family and food and how they intersect. Really would recommend.

[Adam Byatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eileen Chong's newest work, A Thousand Crimson Blooms is intimately personal and profound. Divided into four thematic chapters it deals with grief, loss, love, identity and infertility.
It is beautifully lyrical in the observational details of life that frame our experiences.
In "Spring Festival" she writes, "My husband reminds me I write poems/in threes: three lines, three pathways." It's a beautiful symmetry that is woven throughout the collection, as are references to colour: red and blue.
I was arrested by the line, "My mother cannot/craft in art what she never saw in life" (My Mother, Painting) in that attempt for us to see ourselves as we are, and how others see us.
It also contains the first poem I read of hers, "My Mother Talks In Numbers" in an edition of Meanjin and it's still my standout favourite.
I thoroughly recommend this collection.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection to savour. Some made me cry. 4.5 *

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful and heartbreaking collection that examines loss, grief, and the migrant experience.

[Alyce Caswell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't read Eileen Chong's work before, so I didn't know what to expect - or that I would re-read so many poems before moving on to the next. A poignant collection of memory and pain and love.

[Hermine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think I know enough about art sometimes, to be able to meaningfully engage with poetry that is in response to other poems.

[Sam P · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe on a re-read I will understand more & rate it higher.