NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews
The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves and
Other Poems by Aileen
I. Cassinetto
(Little
Dove Books, Morgan Hill, CA, 2018)
Aileen I. Cassinetto is a Filipino American author and
poet whose work has been published widely in anthologies and journals at home
and abroad. She is the author of the poetry collection, traje de boda (Meritage Press) and three poetry chapbooks, The Art of Salamat, B&O Blues and Tweet (Locofo). She also runs an
independent literary press established in 2016, which has released 16 books to
date.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cassinetto is a
poet who, by her own admission, is moved by shorelines and several of the works
in this collection are never far from the sea. In Salambao (a word for a large Philippine fishing net which is
supported by a long bamboo crosspiece mounted on a raft) she tells her readers:
I wish
to write
of waters
in
remembrance of my mythic
forefather,
island-man fisherman,
rowing two
thousand
nautical
miles without
a compass,
to cast
out his net below
sunlit
surface waters.
Her poetry and prose teem with life and life-giving
water. In the opening poem, From “The Enormous
River Encircling the World” we are introduced to Okeanos, the divine
personification of the sea, who is envisaged as an enormous river enclosing the
known world. Cassinetto invites us to explore its watery depths. Here we find
pelagic marine molluscs, an eye-banded sailor fish, freshwater fish from the
family Cichlidae, the common sea
dragon, large seahorses, reef pipefish, brittle stars and stumpy-spined
cuttlefish. There are plants here too, seaside fleabane, sea pinks and
sagebrush. Into this abundant, colorful setting, “the might of the ocean
stream” Cassinetto adds a word of caution:
In
ocean-speak
learn the
art of camouflage.
Seas can be dangerous. In Point Joe –a rocky southwestern end of Spanish Bay, California,
Cassinetto writes forcefully about shipwrecks, and commemorates one in
particular, the loss of the Catalina, that happened there:
How do you
mark less than shining hours?
The loss
of a ship?
A limb?
Daughters.
For Cassinetto, the sea even flows into art. In A Day at the Museum with a Poet, three
out of the four paintings that she chooses to comment on have the sea at their
heart: Monet’s “The Beach at Trouville”, Braque’s “Little Harbor in Normandy”
and Picasso’s “The Scallop Shell”.
Cassinetto is a poet of unhurried reflection. Viewing “The Beach at Trouville” she sees
more than just the beach scene. She observes the grains of sand on its surface
revealing that it must have been painted on the beach and wonders whether the
composition defined the uncertainty in the summer of 1870. In Braque’s sea and sky, she captures the
energy and abstraction of the composition in its compressed treatment of space
and its severe geometrical patterning. In three of the four paintings viewed in
this poem, she poses questions in search of truth.
Monet and his house at Giverny are the subject of a
separate poem which appears a page or so later. Monet loved colors and chose all
the colors in the house. Colors, which Cassinetto likens to individual plants,
are at the heart of this poem.
Her poems also teem with objects. In The Cabinet of the World and the Journeys of
Women, Cassinetto documents some of the contents of Caroline of Ansbach’s
room of wonder. Cassinetto tells us that
the poem was inspired by the “Enchanted Palace” Exhibiton (London, 2010) and by
“Wunderkammer” (Royal Collection
Trust). In the poem she places emphasis on the fact that the interests of this
Georgian queen who brought the enlightenment to Britain went far beyond the
collecting and cataloguing of mere curiosities. They also embraced science and
medicine. Her decision to inoculate the
royal children against smallpox convinced many other parents that the procedure
was safe:
But how do
you catalog
ideas such
as inoculation?
…
surely, it
warrants its own class—
one that speaks
of grit and
mother
wit…
The cataloging of objects in the first part of the
poem is matched by the cataloging of books in The Boatman’s Book Spine Poetry which was inspired by titles
featured in Our Own Voice’s Bookshelf.
It is another example of a found poem which is also a list poem.
Language is another focus of attention. Cassinetto is
a poet who wrestles with the weight of words. In the Island of Good Boots, a poem about culture, tradition,
authority and servitude, is a case in
point. The two essays, How a Manileña Learned
a Language and Lost in
Translation provide us with an insight into the difficulties encountered in
learning a new language and, by implication, a new culture. Words in Tagalog,
Romaji, Latin and Spanish are a feature of her work.
There is also a sense in which her poems and prose are
grounded in history. Historical dates are frequent markers in her work: one of
her poems is titled Isle of Skye, 1920;
three of the four works of art she alludes to in A Day at the Museum with a Poet carry the dates of their
composition; her poems San Francisco
Haiku and Summer of Love are
referenced as the summer of ’67; B &
0 Blues No. 3 tells of Chinese workers blasting areas for railroad tracks
in the Sierra Nevada in 1868 and the Union Pacific’s Irish laborers laying
tracks in Utah in 1869 and Lolo Claudio
in Colorado opens with events in the early part of the twentieth century
when Filipinos, being U.S. national citizens, were allowed to travel freely to
America.
In the story from which the title of this collection
is derived, a piece that Cassinetto describes as unfinished prose, we discover more about the purple yam or ube which is now gaining notoriety in
several restaurants across the cities of America where it shows up in a lot of
desserts because of its slightly sweet flavor and rich texture. It is in this
story that Cassinetto gives us a little bit of traditional Filipino cuisine and
also, by implication, culture. The story, which she started writing about ten
years ago, was intended to be a novel but, because the narrative is cohesive
enough, it now stands on its own.
Of her essays, special mention should be made of The Color of Kalamunding – a well-crafted
meditational piece that likens the separation of a type of citrus fruit from its
parent branch and, ultimately, from itself (Do
the golden orange halves feel the loss of the golden orange whole?) to the
separation of the soul from the body. In it, Cassinetto traces the process of
separation and the business of dying, through the use of metaphor. The essay is also about how memory, the means
by which we preserve our link with the past, also fails us in the long term.
Sadly, our recollections become colored by our
limitations and perceptions.
A shorter essay, Traveling
with Tsinelas, explores the subject of exile and longing. When the author
is invited to a Filipino family’s home for dinner, the mere sight of a row of
pairs of tsinelas (a term derived
from the Filipino word for flip-flops) fills her with emotion:
It was the
most beautiful sight. They stood for everything I was so sorely and terribly
missing – my home, my family, fragments of my culture.
In Lolo Claudio
in Colorado, Cassinetto pays homage to her great grandfather and
grandfather and ultimately to the three million Filipino Americans scattered
across the U.S. today: the country where, as a poet, she first broke her stride.
In her inauguration address on her appointment as Poet
Laureate of San Mateo County, Cassinetto said “to be a poet is to help build, gather, restore. It’s about hope, that
great unifier, which transforms lives, which fortifies communities, which
changes the world.” This collection of her poetry and prose does just that.
It is a positive testimony to the power of creativity and the tenacity of the human
spirit. Recommended.
*****
Neil Leadbeater is an author, essayist, poet and critic living in
Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published
widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His publications include
Librettos for the Black Madonna
(White Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester
Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The
Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014), Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017) and Punching Cork Stoppers (Original Plus,
2018). His work has been translated into several languages.
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