"The believing blue of night sky"*

A short review of Pháp Hoan's Seasonal Calendar (AJAR press, 2016) by Phạm Minh Đăng
 

In a world where every occurrence drags some noise along with it, which occurrence will carry the purest and most tranquil sounds? - I pick up Seasonal Calendar by Pháp Hoan.

Which kind of space will guide readers into a truly different world, a mental space of natural images and quotidian lives of anonymous people? The space in Seasonal Calendar is (partly) that.

Seasonal Calendar is flooded with images of mediations and embodiments. The images do not tempt readers to “float along emotional streams” but to view the writer’s mental landscape from a certain distance, to watch dreams as they fall released or are embodied in poetic vision.

I find the space full of a higher grace created by this writer’s mind, enough for the subject to overwhelmingly melt into millions of beings, or for the writer himself to seem about to fall down just as the imaginary “insane old monk plunges down to the bottom of an abyss" in his created world.

Lines of trees quietly burn in dream

        roads bend in memory

            tips of grass slant by breath

Each couple of lights entangle and vibrate in space

the whole garden blooms to flower and promptly withers

rolling up in a vortex of wind

coloring white the whole bruised horizon

(“A dream of the blind”)

These days I watch in panic the wounds inflicted on the body of my country, I listen to the cries and the shatterings in the poetry of my friends. Pháp Hoan's poems can be a gentle therapy for loss, for the pain that no one should have to bear.
 

- Phạm Minh Đăng
 

* A line from “Lazy Day", Seasonal Calendar, Pháp Hoan
 

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