Quiet Night Think
Gillian Sze
ECW Press, 2022
Review by Rebecca Mangra
“What emerges from long looking?”
Gillian Sze, in her new book Quiet Night Think, asks readers the question in one of her essays. Long looking requires held attention to a subject, and for me, what results is learning what is missing. After days, maybe years of looking, we become comfortable with what we see; we might have finally understood something. But then we wonder, is this the whole picture? Could it really be telling me only that? Looking begets more looking until we find what makes us feel like it is time to stop looking.
Sze’s hybrid collection of poems and essays is a meditation on the things she has long looked at, thought about, and experienced: early motherhood, Chinese poetry, familial resentments, the borders and simultaneous freedom of language, and more. Poetry and prose speak to each other across decades and seconds. Conversations range from art criticism to insomnia. Sometimes, words simply land on cardinals or the “glaucous leaves of the carnations.” The title of the book signals a nocturnal wondering, of what it means to feel the world be still in the dark. But so many time zones, continents, and histories are spanned in this collection that it gives “night” new meaning. Night is not a marker of time as we think of it, but any moment that has slowed to reveal its largeness. Whether Sze is the only one awake beside her newborn child, or marvelling at a bare maple in early autumn, it is only then in the quiet, in the stopping, that she can appreciate a moment’s true breadth—the way, like night, a moment opens to reveal just how far it extends. Darkness not only lives in the sky but also manifests in our daily blind spots, ignorance, and assumptions. With her incredible skill, Sze has created an eighty-seven-page vessel that feels honest and personal.
Space is a constant thread throughout the collection, where form and content intersect. In the titular essay, Sze writes, “I wanted space, but I didn’t know then that to gain it, you have to lose something. Loss, as my mother already knew, is what provides the space from which meaning can emerge.” Through this collection, Sze is trying to navigate the many spaces in her life to decide: are all spaces meant to be filled? Or are all spaces a starting point for eruption? What do we gain when we lose? Space is a critical factor in poems: the addition or subtraction of it can create distance or smothering. In an essay, space manifests through word choice, paragraph order, and omissions from the manuscript itself. The book’s taut language tells me there is a sense of Sze wanting to eliminate space, but also leave enough of it for readers to sink into. Space then becomes something to be communally filled, as she ruminates on when thinking of her father: “What I think my father wanted most was to make a sound, reverberating across the slow prairies, and to hear me make—if not the same sound—at least something close enough that he could consider an echo.”
What fascinates me the most about the book is the relationship between the two literary forms of personal essay and poetry, which are usually at odds with each other. Poems offer us a small glimpse into an anonymous speaker, where rhythm, blank space, and enjambment all interact at different degrees to create something strange or heartbreaking or memorable. The personal essay, on the other hand, forces us to identify ourselves—to get as close as we can to the truth, to name our wounds, and to argue our hearts through a sizable word count.
In Sze’s collection, the distance between the two genres becomes threatened. An essay by Sze about the similarities between the relentless pursuit of weeding and those of writing and parenting follows a prose poem about a pregnant woman craving a beer on a summer patio. Sze and her many speakers intersect and collide, each providing new context for the other. We learn what motherhood is like for Sze in her essays, and then dive into poems whose speakers are also new mothers—yet their worlds operate in a liminal space where nothing is true or false. The gaps in the poems are not filled by Sze’s prose, but rather intensified.
The poems, ranging from prose to long poems, are all beautifully shaped, carved down to their stunning cores. Nothing is excessive; every word has gone through an extensive visa process to live on Sze’s page. Many poems capture the sublimity of nature and everyday moments. There are poems that subverted my expectations and ones that frankly stunned me. “Seize” is one of my favourites: “I anticipate summer where new / eyes blink, confused by the sudden colour.”
The essays ground us in the real. We meet Sze in her different worlds: as a teacher, a wife, a filmmaker, a daughter. She meditates on her upbringing in a predominantly white town in Winnipeg, her complicated relationship with her father, and the challenges and pleasures of motherhood. Through these essays, we learn not only about her but also about how she moves around in the world. Her prose is as clean and imaged as her poetry; nothing is there for show. Sze writes with a poet’s propensity, attuned to particular images and beautiful metaphors. At times, I would have preferred the poetic language scaled back a bit to reveal more straightforward candour.
In her essay “The Hesitant Gaze,” Sze reflects, “The poet too is the curtain flicked aside to let through the light. I try to hold myself open long enough so that it may confront and impress itself upon some black obscurity.” Quiet Night Think is the result of Sze’s attempt to capture the belly of her life on the page; an attempt to see, like the parting of a curtain, what is illuminated and what lives in the dark. It is a beautiful exploration of form and identity—of disappointment, of appreciation, of language. Of the everyday moments that offer absolute grandeur, if we would simply look longer.
Rebecca Mangra (she/her) is a Canadian writer and editor. Her work has been featured in ELLE Canada, Canthius, and other places. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.