Eileen Chong’s latest poetry collection, We Speak of Flowers, unspools the infinite nature of grief across time and space. In Buddhist belief, 100 days after a person has died, they are reborn or liberated from reincarnation, marking the end of the formal grieving process. The 101 fragments that comprise this collection are intended to be read in any order, so each fragment can simultaneously represent one of the liminal first days of death or the 101st day.
While there may be linear structures around our grief, this collection proposes that grief itself is not so straightforward. Like these poems, grief is reconstituted with each encounter. These fragments range in form, utilising strings of prose or couplets or the refrain of a ghazal, but consistently and skilfully follow an intuitive sound, emotion and pace.
There is a driving tension created by the distances of space and time between Chong and her ancestors, as questioned in the 100th fragment: “Can spirits / find their descendents lost in foreign countries?” The distance feels greater in the sixth fragment: “I call these names in the night. / My people, I cry. My people – / There is no answer. / They are long cold in the earth. / They are far beyond communion.” While Chong navigates a transcendental pain in these lines – ancestors who struggle to reach us while we fail to reach them – this collection becomes an act of communion itself.
Chong recognises that, despite these disconnections, she carries the past with her. Memory and grief do not dissipate evenly over our lives and worlds; they cling and accumulate in certain places, they are passed down and inherited. This collection generates echoes and resonances between its pages, mirroring the hum of memory that underlies our lives – old grief being stirred up by new mourning and the weight of kitchenware inherited from hand to hand. From the 22nd fragment: “From before memory, I remember. Memory finds its locus in my body.”
The death of Chong’s grandmother is a pivotal, palpable loss that is felt across this collection. Chong honours her grandmother’s memory by writing through her grief; where a dream is a visitation and a memory is an invocation, we experience all the different forms of absence that are felt after the loss of someone so significant.
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This collection succeeds as a masterful elegy and an outpouring of love, with a form that captures boundless possibilities and reconstitutions, allowing Chong to explore how grief is proof of love as infinite.
We Speak of Flowers, Eileen Chong
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
ISBN: 9780702268625
Format: Paperback
Pages:Â 128pp
Publication:Â 4 February 2025
RRP: $24.99
