What’s Kevin Irie Reading?

As with people, some poetry books hold your respect, others hold your imagination. I am thinking in particular of a debut collection I bought earlier this year. shima by shō yamagushiku (McClelland & Stewart 2024) is an absolutely compelling achievement, a work set in our time that lives beyond this time, spiralling like his visual poems into concentric circles of cumulative self-awareness. 

shima focuses on yamagushiku’s search for his ancestral roots in Okinawa, Japan, yet it is simultaneously an escape from that very search: he knows that the ideal of a “reclamation of identity” may simply perpetuate the same social power structures, here linked with the father and patriarchy. He writes: “I wander down Crenshaw / looking to buy an ancestor.” In an interview with Yvonne Blomer, he stated how he is well aware that “what lies beneath a wound is often simply another wound.” Hence, there is yamagushiku’s immersion in, or into, nature: “the trees taught me intimacy when the waking world ran from me.” Hence, the movement from one dreamlike state to another where images of nature overtake him, transform him, offering change but not closure. Identities can be shed like leaves, bark, branches, or skin. 

I am also struck by yamagushiku’s uncanny ability to spatially arrange his lines so that his poems breathe and expand, or contract into strict prose, as needed, as to how he just knows how to visually convey the mood of individual poems to the reader. You are unaware of how much yamagushiku guides you forward even as you read of a self adrift. He is a rare visionary poet who transforms the reader into an acolyte of his own ardent quest.