The Open by Lucy Van
I was immediately intrigued by Merlinda Bobis’s introduction to The Open in which she describes Lucy Van’s poetry as having ‘all doors open’. This is true – not just in the frequent imagery surrounding doors in this collection – but that poetry allows Van to walk through history, while still living with the effects of colonisation. It is an invitation to the reader to walk with her.
The Open comprises four sections: Hotel Grand Saigon, The Esplanade, Australian Open I and Australian Open II. The first three sections are long poems broken into parts, with the final section comprising mostly unconnected poems. In ‘Hotel Grand Saigon’, Van goes back to Vietnam to visit her extended family and learn more about her father. At one point, Van is stuck in a gift shop, unable to speak much of either French or Vietnamese, further estranged from her own history.
‘Possession is a grammatical category. Contraction is a poetic category. Poetry is a possessive contraction’ is a line that I was thinking about for a long time after I read it; Van uses poetry to explore not just how Vietnam and Australia have been and still are possessed by colonisers, but also to try to unfurl her father’s migration story.
At times gritty and grungy, ‘The Esplanade’ and ‘Australian Open I’ explore Australian identity, and friendships and relationships, with the serve and return of tennis as a metaphor for the ways that we relate to each other, even as we often ignore bigger issues, encapsulated in Van’s image of Manus detainees on another television screen nearby when she watches the tennis.
This collection is for a confident poetry reader – especially one interested in decolonisation. With long and theoretical prose poems referencing Foucault and Kristeva, as well as poets such as Bishop and Plath, some readers may feel overwhelmed. However, Van’s absolute strength is infusing small images with the emotions of decolonisation.
