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Read Madeleine Slavick’s “The Yellow Chair” HERE.
Madeleine Slavick, Town, The Cuba Press, 2024. 132 pgs.
Imagine a poet and a photographer collaborating. What will they create? Town is such a work but in a unique way because Madeleine Slavick herself embodies both artistic roles. Published in Aotearoa New Zealand, the book mediates her new hometown while capturing the rippling reverberations of her 25 years of memories in Hong Kong. Reading a hybrid of prose, poetry, stories, and photographs, I am curious: what is the relationship between an actual site of the town in New Zealand, its existence in Slavick’s text-image practices, and my own imaginative version of it as a reader/viewer?
Town, to me feels like an architectural space beyond the book form. It is best enjoyed as a physical copy. Flipping through the pages, you navigate yourself through Slavick’s poetic “I” and photographic “eye”.
People are never seen in her photographs. Plants, animals, and objects prevail: the material traces of Slavick’s musings, wanderings, and practical activities. On pages 38–39, to your right, a large inflatable clone, the only human figure in the book, sits on the front lawn of a house, smiling. To your left, five irregular rocks lie in a circle around a green utility box. Are they chatting or chanting?
The landscape of the town is marked by such juxtapositions of natural elements and man-made objects. Sometimes you feel a sense of displacement and are anxious to find out what is real. However, as I continue through the poems, I come to see how the town “writes” itself: signs, letterboxes, roads, weatherboards are just as much residents of the town as the blue eels, white wings, sleeping dogs, kiwi, and a nest of swallows.
What is inanimate in the photographs also murmurs to me somewhere, anywhere in the poems. For example, one recurring motif I noticed was “sign”, flickering in various corners of the book. If you glean them all, you will come to a smile of understanding: Slavick does not simply read the town’s signs, but rather, she pauses and plays with them. She learns the town as if learning a new language. How signs of a café, an art gallery, a nature reserve are named after “the second millennium”, “extinct animal”, “a yellow plum”, “the hitchhiker’s number in the guide to the galaxy”. How a single sign could speak simultaneously to her about “song and longing” in Māori and “a dead man and a suffix” in English.
In this way poems and photographs are self-contained. They correspond, rather than act as captions, illustrations, or explanations to each other. Together they are revelations of how Town explores Slavick’s own relationship with her new home in New Zealand. They connect her everyday activities from writing, taking photographs, learning Māori, to the little events of disturbance like the gift-giving, parenting, witnessing the homekill of an animal, and encountering an injured hawk on the side of the road.
Beyond town life, I also found myself captured by a more immediate desire of Slavick’s poetic reveries and photographic gaze. Can Town also reveal the poignancy in the gap between one’s past and present?
During afternoon strolls, I carry it in my hand. The book, slightly bigger than my palm, feels large. A magnetic force radiates from the photograph on the cover: a rectangle of foliage frames my attention. Roots cascade to the ground, snaking down—the shape of time. Tendrils creep across the wall, thick or thin, revealing an imaginative landscape: rivulets of memory branching out into streams; thoughts roaming.
Isn’t this like what I saw on the streets of Hong Kong? I feel transported to Nathan Road. Just outside Kowloon Park, huge banyan trees’ flowing roots reach down at my feet to form a dense labyrinth. I don’t know if Slavick, when taking her tree photographs, would think back to her 25 years living in Hong Kong. But moments like this work on me as a “photopoetic punctum”. To expand Roland Barthes’s idea of punctum, a “photopoetic punctum” in Slavick’s creative composite is something that pierces out of the image and touches me through her poetic language. And this is how Town as a whole affects me: places are connected in the sense of “here and there”, in a constant “sway” between home and elsewhere.
One of the photopoetic puncta is the temporal-spatial contingency of colour. There is a close-up picture of a blue flower: at dusk, the light dim, background dark, the purple and blue petals wave in the wind, their blue-black colour almost spilling out of the frame. You are left unsure what the flower is. Only the blueness lingers on the eye. But suddenly, it triggers a sense of déjà vu, leading you to recall a similar shade of blue in the poem “Jacaranda”:
Unseen for years, you had become a word, a sound,
something joyous to say aloud, so when you reappear,
your huge purple head of blue petals, your five lobes in
large panicles, I sway all over again.
Immediately, “I”, upon seeing a jacaranda again, “sway” into the depth of memory:
The first time I loved you was on the other side of the
dateline, in a dry valley of smog and highway. Then with
haze and skyscraper by the South China Sea.
The picture of the blue flower and the poetic address to the jacaranda here together punctuate the word-image sequences in Town as meanings slither off the edges of different pages and braid into one, together cutting across time and space. This force is augmented in the rest of “Jacaranda”, where a testimony of remembrance becomes monumental:
We ask if jacaranda can happen in our town: It depends.
It can be tender in frost. And fickle.
We plant the seeds taken from a tree up north. We wait.
For Slavick, “to write is to touch” (from “Write, Writer”). Language and objects also “touch” her, causing this “sway” between text and image, here and there, past and present. To touch and to be touched is to experience this spatial-temporality of “sway”. In the words of Susan Sontag, by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: “…touch me like the delayed rays of a star”. The rays of the jacaranda, of its blue petals, linked a past life in Hong Kong now touch the present.
In his book Photopoetry, Michael Nott posits that “the relationship between poem and photograph has always been one of disruption and serendipity, appropriation and exchange, evocation and metaphor” (2). This could be why Slavick is deeply engaged with the combination of text and image. It is a way to come to terms with memory that is concrete and lived in our bodies. As the photo-poet Rebecca Norris Webb once wrote: “Some cities slip off the map of our imagination, others insist on living inside us—Havana, Istanbul, Brooklyn.”
Slavick’s “Hong香 Kong港 Song嗓” stands out and begs the question of home. “Song” shares a similar pronunciation to the throat 嗓 in Chinese suggesting a strong sense of vocal and language affinity. Is “Song” of Hong Kong a language of Cantonese and a bond of home? The ending line refers to the embodied wisdom in the creation of Chinese characters in ancient times: “A pig under a roof, the character for home” (17). Home 家 is not a physical house or a fixed idea; it sways between here and there, in perpetual movement.
Slavick’s earlier collection Fifty Stories Fifty Images (2013) encapsulates her experience living in Hong Kong. In “Writing Is Home”, Slavick writes: “Home. I spend a lot of time at home, and I have several. I like to make homes, to unpack, and decide where everything lives.” This reminds me of an object that appears in both books: four white letters in cardboard N-E-A-R. When I ask about its significance, Slavick replies: “Yes, those letters N-E-A-R were with me in my HK home and are also with me, near my desk, in my NZ home! ‘To write is to touch,’ I have written in Town, and the word ‘near’ reminds me to touch through the language I use and choose.”
Especially when reading alongside Fifty Stories Fifty Images, Slavick’s newest book Town is home-turned, home-with, but not necessarily at or about home. If Hong Kong is an epicentre that vibrated for 25 years for Slavick, then where its ripples intersect with the present, Town arises.
Below are some of the photographs from Town, courtesy of Madeleine Slavick.
How to cite: Zheng, Aqua Kaiyun. “Where Ripples Intersects: Madeleine Slavick’s Photopoetry Collection Town.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 9 Jul. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/07/09/town.
Aqua Kaiyun Zheng is currently doing practice-based doctoral research on the connection between poetry and photography at the English Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is interested in various forms of photopoetic responses realised as creative criticism, artist books, living archives, interactive literatures, and exhibitions. She received her MA in Chinese Literature at SOAS, where she explored the intersection of poetry with folk song music. Her research art projects are birthed from poetry and rooted in autoethnography to unearth the unfelt. She moderates “Phase Boundaries”, a monthly interdisciplinary reading group working towards a borderless space that settles poetry-art-philosophy-anthropology. Join her via kaiyun.zheng@live.com or @aquayun.
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