Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan (Faber, £10.99)
“I am asked why my poems are so clear. I’ll confess: / it’s what happens when you want to be understood.” Other people matter a lot in Chan’s poetry, and many poems in Bright Fear, a follow-up to the Costa-winning Flèche, negotiate anxieties about recognition and misrecognition by parents, strangers, white people and possibly the poet’s therapist. Chan says “I migrate between cities and selves”, and the book captures the painful cost of multiple geographical and linguistic migrations as it moves between Britain and Hong Kong, English and Cantonese. Juxtaposing the 2003 Hong Kong Sars outbreak with the Covid-19 pandemic, Chan reports racist threats and microaggressions, in which “whiteness greets me / like a stopping device”. The most inquiring poems are in the last section, Field Notes on a Family, where Chan writes movingly about home and “unhomeliness”, exploring the difficult silences between mother and daughter, traditional values and queerness. Scrupulously self-investigative, Chan’s diary-like prose poems and plain-speaking lyrics maintain “a sense of / critical distance” between materials and feelings: “All fear is grief: how my mother wants / me home, how tears come on like poems.”
