Essence
Thuy On
ISBN 978-1-76080-299-8
Reviewed by PARIS ROSEMONT
Thuy On’s third poetry collection, Essence (UWA Publishing, 2025), follows on from her previous collections Turbulence and Decadence. Punctuated into three sections where even the titles are in quaint collective interplay – respectively named ‘Art’, ‘Heart’, and ‘À la carte’ – punchy wordplay enlivens On’s work with an immediacy and accessibility that makes this poetry for the people. She knows her audience (fellow poets [because really, does anyone else read poetry these days…]) and has a field day lamenting some of the trials and tribulations of creative practice. Her poem ‘If rejection slips were honest’ is a refreshing example of this:
Dear writer, your social media following is negligible, your face doesn’t have the requisite photogenic attributes that will, Helen-like, launch a thousand moveable units. You lack both the currency of youth and the mystique of a childhood trauma…
(p.32)
Here, On ponders the notion of unspoken publishing criterion. She doesn’t shy away from calling out the sorry state of contemporary #WritersLife reality within a flawed industry. It is with more than a touch of glee and satisfaction that we – as both readers and writers – reach the conclusion of this poem, in which those who have rejected us end up ‘look[ing] like a bag of dicks.’
There’s a self-awareness and playfulness in On’s poems, as ‘Free style poem as interpretative dance’ demonstrates. She pokes fun at the very craft she is in the business of creating. Indeed, she satirically muses ‘no one has time for an epic heroic poem.’ Right on cue, the next poem in her book boils down an array of epic tomes into bite-sized morsels for the modern reader’s short attention-spanned delectation. Whilst employing the traditional Japanese form of haiku, the language is fresh and contemporary, embracing colloquial vernacular, its tone witty and humorous. We gobble down these hybrid offerings like cheeky CliffsNotes synopses for the cool kids:
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
Prophecies fulfilled
intra-familial root
soz dad…oh my eyes!
(‘Twelve classic texts in Haiku’ p25)
The sequencing of the poems in this collection is a curatorial artform in itself. There is interplay not only between On’s poetry and the works of others, but also between On and On! She leapfrogs a continuum between one poem to the next. So it is that we see the poem ‘Send in the Clown’ adjacent to ‘Tears for a Clown’. Close attention yields even more threads of connectivity between poems. An ode to Kylie Minogue (‘Shocked’) is juxtaposed with aftershocks in the next poem—ghostly spectres that ‘spin round and round’ in ‘After Life’.
Drawing upon On’s experience as an arts journalist, editor and critic, Essence delivers on its promise to ‘broaden its reach into the arts’. This is poetry that invites readers into a kind of dialogue with the poet and the essence of the art she chooses to examine. From Maggie Cheung’s:
…blood red
velvet cheongsam…
lily neck upright via Mandarin collar…
constrained in a skin of desire…
(‘To Maggie Cheung, In the Mood for Love’ p.6)
to the ‘thrumming heat of Kylie Minogue with her long-lashed flickers’ (‘Shocked’), the reader is plunged into a pop culture paradise. These ekphrastic odes to various artforms – books, film, music, art – contained within the first section of Essence are brimming with observations laden with in-jokes and for the arts-savvy.
A contemporary pulse threads its way through much of On’s work. Take ‘Version 2.0’, for example, where the speaker seeks to ‘…absorb your meld of data and cells / hyperlink them to my fingerprint’. Intertextuality adds contextual weight. On deftly invokes Bonnard’s nudes (‘Nude in Recline’) to the dramatic principle of ‘Chekov’s gun’, Ovidian, Albrechtian ballerinas (‘Swan Lake haiku’; ‘After Life, after Giselle’) through to the all-star saturated literary bingo of ‘Get Lit Again (with one Aussie cameo)’. By springboarding off known commodities, these poems become the surface layers in cultural pentimenti. However, it begs the question, as ekphrasis often does: when invoking the essence of works upon which they draw, has the poet done enough to earn their gravitas-by-association, or are the source cameos doing most of the heavy lifting?
Where the ‘Art’ section of Essence is a heady romp through external influences and inspiration, the second part turns the spotlight inward. ‘Heart’ gives way to a softness and sensuality. Here, we get:
…the moon with its milky full belly…
tidepools of your eyes…
intimate with the texture of
your days / read the goosebumps stippled on your skin…
(‘Cadence’ p.53)
‘Art’ makes the reader think; ‘Heart’ makes the reader feel. By spilling her heart onto the page, the poet’s vulnerability ‘tenderise[s]’ ours (‘How to Grow a Shell’). These poems lull and coo and question and muse in ‘pianissimo’ (‘Cadence’). This softening is a welcome gear-change from the razzle dazzle of ‘Art’. It feels more real. No longer in the public exhibition space, ‘Heart’ leads the reader into the more nuanced ‘latticed holding’ of the intimate interior (‘Metaverse’). On challenges us to:
…stop cosplaying humans
and strip to the animal.
(‘Beasts’ p.58)
Certainly, a daring notion that thrills at what it suggests. Yet the reader is kept aloft and ‘only from a distance do the pieces hold up’ (‘Trompe l’oeil’).
This second section contains a suite of poems about love in its various guises and gradients. We are plunged into the erotically sensuous realm of ‘Seduction (2 stars)’ where the poet proceeds to ‘unbutton her skin to him / expose the very bosom of her wants’. Dizzying ‘Whirligig Days’ with its slick rhymes ‘…this is hardcore / this is closed door / this is time whore…’ give way to the strangely compelling:
…random smells seduce
& they follow heavy balled
blue tongue lolling.
(‘Rehab’ p.56)
But where is the beast that was tantalisingly introduced to us à la Chekov’s gun? It appears to remain muzzled behind the fast punches of wordsmithing where we may admire but cannot quite touch or be touched.
‘Heart’ closes with a Pillow Book style list of aphorisms from the philosophical:
- A cherry-lipped hurt will follow monasteries of silence
to the wise-cracking feminist:
- Being a slave to a cat is still better than being a doormat of a man
(p.70)
This feast of a collection finishes with the eclectic ‘À la carte’ section. A hotpot of poems ranging from surreal stream of consciousness ponderings (‘Parachute’) to ‘Bold Type(s)’ ‘hey heyyying on dating apps’, pets (‘To Mochi’), motherhood (‘Liminal’), meatballs (‘Lost in IKEA’) and meditations:
…bruised as a Caravaggio apple
softly plump flesh sallow sweet…
(‘Breathe’ p.80)
The poems in Essence oscillate between silver-tongued tributes, wry commentary, and societal smackdowns. On holds no prisoners as she describes ‘Vietnam whorehouses set to muzak gush…composed by two French men with colonialism in their blood ink as rich white audiences mouth along to this paternalistic paean / plump throats thrilling to the beat’ (‘I don’t love you any time after Miss Saigon‘ p.9). Deliberately jarring explorations of cultural appropriation, identity, and assimilation resurface in the scathing poems ‘To be a performative Asian’, ‘Fake Asian’ and ‘Blackheads’. These poems howl the rage of unresolved generational trauma. On has ‘sharpened [her] chopsticks’ as she simmers with the frustration of cultural displacement, rebelling against ‘whiteness [as] a default / normcore against which you are measured’ (p.82-83). She serves her dishes with powder keg fury. There’s more than just essence in these poems–there’s a whole bucket of anchovies when sometimes a subtler splash of fish sauce would provide umami notes transcendent with the liminal.
On is a triple threat of comedian, critic, and culture vulture. Through intertextual invocations, the poems in Essence become ‘hurtling atoms / assembled then broken anew’ (‘Pinball’). Readers hover on the decorative surface, the ‘wing-shimmer moment(s)’ of her words (‘Here one moment’), sometimes wishing they were a little less ephemeral, and that they offered us more to fill our bellies with. Nevertheless, these poems have a distinct voice, pacing, and immediacy, and as the poet On reflects in ‘Still not a Prince’: ‘these fairy floss tales / stick to [our] teeth’.