Poetry is sometimes written out of need – it builds out of what cannot be said and speaks – like water flowing through a narrow conduit. Necessity has its own authority. This is the case in Mary Jean Chan’s superb second collection, Bright Fear, a development of their Costa-winning debut, Flèche, which was partly about their mother’s life growing up amid the political turbulence of 20th-century China. Chan’s own turbulence is more personal. They are queer and have translated themselves from Hong Kong into the UK. They explore here the pain of disappointing parental expectation, of breaking free from hidebound familial hopes. What is unexpectedly touching is the complicated tenderness with which they write about their parents. In A Denim Shirt, they talk about meeting them at an airport and regret they were not kinder: “Too much honesty can be a fault, I remind my impatient heart.” In the same moving poem, the mother comes wordlessly closer to accepting her daughter’s sexuality. It ends with the discovery that she has slipped a denim shirt into their suitcase and wrapped it round a box of Godiva chocolates:
For you and J, you said. You did
not mention the shirt, the kind you had always told
me never to wear. I thanked you, for the chocolates.
Chocolates speak louder than words but it is the denim shirt that is the clincher.
