Fire Cider Rain
Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin
Coach House Books, 2022
Review by Kim Trainor
In Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin’s Fire Cider Rain, an armature of scientific terminology undergirds imagery that is fluid, languid, and meandering, like gauze or drifts of rain. The steel frame is most apparent in the book’s four section titles, which are written like portions of a textbook on weather (Part 1: Evaporate, Part 2: Condensate, Part 3: Precipitate, Part 4: Collect). Many of the poem’s titles in this collection reflect that same pattern: “Coefficients of Friction,” “The Laws of Thermodynamics I and II.” The effect of this dreamlike imagery juxtaposed with weather terminology serves to ground the more ephemeral nature of memory.
The narrative arc takes hard work to discern at first reading, as it moves temporally in two directions simultaneously. We move towards the death of the grandmother, Wàipó, culminating in the touching final poem, “Māmā Where Does Your Light Leak?” The poems also move backwards in memory, a journey to Toronto as an eight-year-old child, as signaled by the note beneath the title of the first poem, which reads “MRU→CDG→YYZ,” that is, Mauritius Airport, Charles de Gaule, Toronto Pearson. An elusive, fragmented style, salted with a fairly dense use of scientific terms, will require work from the reader. This is not a complaint, but a fair warning. And because slips of memory are often retrieved, it is not always clear what exactly is being described or remembered. Perhaps this stylistic approach recapitulates the experience of the partial recall of childhood memories.
The speaker of these poems addresses only her mother (Māmā) directly; a lover, Selia, appears in some poems. The poet has noted, in an interview in The Ex-Puritan, that while she explores her maternal Chinese-Mauritian heritage, this heritage comes from her father. This twist provides a certain distance for reflection:
I do want to share that this book is not a direct reflection of my own life. In my own life, my father’s side of the family is from Mauritius and my mother’s side of the family is from Scotland. The way maternal relationships are experienced and explored in this book are distilled from a number of sources—from stories I have been told about my family’s matrilineal lineages (on both sides of my family), and from some of my own experiences growing up. Maternal relationships are incredibly intimate, and the distance between mother and daughter grows and then shrinks and folds in unexpected ways as we grow older. (The Ex-Puritan)
This bittersweet recollection of childhood and complex ancestral ties is captured in the title, Fire Cider Rain, where “fire cider” is a home remedy, a tonic for sore throats and colds (The Ex-Puritan), and is alluded to in one of the finest poems of the collection, “Recipe for a Southern Cyclone,” which begins with the note, “To yield a perfect cyclone, it must be August. This recipe is best followed in the evening. In the evening, grief changes colour.” Its ingredients are then simply listed, and there is something so splendid in reading a recipe, a list of ingredients, in a poem: “one jar / freshly peeled ginger root / freshly grated horseradish / one chopped onion / a handful of garlic cloves / zest from a lemon / turmeric and cayenne powder / ½ litre of apple cider vinegar / raw honey / A quiet place to mourn.” It reminds us that often simplicity is more in poetry, a basic list of ingredients that evokes the hot tang of ginger and the fire of horse radish. The list of ingredients suggests something hot, something that will cause the insides to burn and glow.
But this is poetry, and of course, a turn comes at the end of the list, “A quiet place to mourn,” leaving the reader to wonder, what memories are evoked by this recipe? This line speaks back to the note beneath the poem’s title, which observes that “In the evening, grief changes colour.” This poem will speak to readers who know the powerful evocations of food and the way sorrow darkens as night falls. The rest of the poem is a list of numbered instructions, deftly executed. For example, “1. Fill the glass with apple cider vinegar and place it on the table. Forget the rest.” Then dip your finger into the cider vinegar, “until your skin feels like fire pulled taut over a rockface,” referencing the burn of friction. While the list of ingredients could plausibly make a tonic, the title indicates this is a recipe for a southern cyclone. This combination evokes, as does the collection as a whole, the weather of grief and family dynamics. The discharge of energy and subsequent damage are suggested by images such as an “amber cyclone” and a flight of pigeons “dripping blood.” A warning rhythm builds in the epistrophic pattern that alarms even as it repeats, “Don’t be alarmed,” as in, “9. The bark will fall from the trees. Don’t be alarmed.” Is this an image of the speaker’s grandmother’s death? Do we see her here, in instruction #11? “Now if you squint across the hemispheres you might see her – a woman sinking into the water somewhere in the Indian Ocean, rigid, foot-first, a sad smile wavering. Until it is just her hair resting on the surface – a thousand water snakes billowing from the top of a bottle.” The pattern of rain and electricity subsides into the discharge of energy upon death; the sudden absence and calm. Perhaps a sign of what is to come.
The grandmother’s death is beautifully memorialized in the final poem, “Māmā, Where Does Your Light Leak?” In this longest poem of the collection, the speaker addresses mother, grandmother, ancestors: “before we dissolve / I bow before the women who drain quietly / from decades before us.” This note is hit many times, of sadness, loss, something which cannot be redeemed or retained, but drains “quietly.” For anyone who has experienced the death of an elder, a loved one in hospital, the descriptions throughout this final poem will resonate:
“I met a woman whose head was smoother than the wine spilled at her funeral. she came in a bundle of plastic tubes, thought she could hear a baby in the clock on the hospital wall. the creases in her pillow tapered into white caps stilled mid-grin, aching to curl over dead seasons, hollowed vessels, an abandoned lighthouse. // she was at once the room itself and all the emptiness it held.”
Here we witness the machinery of death—the ticking of the clock, a “bundle of plastic tubes,” and, later read that, “her monitors traced blueprints.” This machinery props up the weathered, thinned body which lies on pillows as if whipped up by the approaching storm, white caps “stilled mid-grin” to “curl over dead seasons, hollowed vessels, an abandoned lighthouse.” The woman is the lighthouse, abandoned; and we think of lighthouses whose purpose is to guide sailors through storms. The woman who is dying, who has died, who is about to die, is then equated with the room itself, “and all the emptiness it held.” Later, the speaker observes, “I took her bruises in my palm as she plotted the coordinates of memory;” this is followed by a stochastic list of words marooned in white space: “dead lime tree,” “cigarette butts.”
But the other more intense relationship is with the mother, of whom the speaker has observed, “I cannot peel from my skin / the layer that is you,” speaking to the fraught, tangled energies of mothers and daughters. The speaker addresses her mother directly: “although it is your mother dying, I know it is all of us at once.” The speaker has observed earlier, “I reach under her pillow in search of where your light leaks and my hand falls through empty space.” This is disorienting: she asks, not where Wàipó’s light leaks, but the addressee, the mother, and then she asks her, “what did the woman in the hospital do to you?” suggesting some form of intergenerational trauma. The collection does not offer consolation; it ends on the words, “this / is a loveless / dance.”
Kim Trainor’s next book, A blueprint for survival will appear with Guernica Editions in Spring 2024. She is currently working on a long poem based on her experiences at Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek.