In the House of Slaves

Lisa A. Dickson teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Evelyn Lau’s new collection of poetry begins with an epigraph from
Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, which concludes, “One thing is funny, though:
that it is you whom he calls ‘mistress’ and himself he calls
‘slave.’” This “funny” inversion is the focus of these poems,
which map the relationship between participants in the sadomasochistic
scene; here the ostensible “mistress” (the dominatrix) becomes an
object—an extension of the masochist’s self-obsession.

The first section of the book is a collection of scenes describing the
sadomasochistic encounter. In “Pressure,” there are finely wrought
images of stockings with “the shimmer of a butterfly’s crushed
wings” and “lips pursed like a cherub’s.” The poems trace,
through the repeating loops of the sexual encounter, the contours of a
subject asked again and again to empty itself and its agency in order to
satisfy another’s fantasy of self-mortification. The woman, despite
the “elegance of [her] whip twirling in the air” (“Nothing Is
Happening”), is strangely absent from the scene, except as a function
of the slave’s desire for punishment; slave and mistress, the epigraph
tells us, are not stable categories. In “Nothing Is Happening,” the
dominatrix emerges from a series of denials as one who is divorced from
the action, “wondering if it will snow in New York in February and
should I wear my new coat and bring a pair of boots.”

The second half of the book is more interesting in that it
contextualizes these images and allows the woman to materialize in the
spaces between the encounters. Here, there is a preoccupation with the
imagery of sunsets and sunrises, and of windows that open into—or
refuse to disclose—the scenery beyond them. Poems like “Transition
Phase” and “The Monk’s Song” evoke a sense of the past taking
hold of the present, and of displacement, as in “Three,” in which a
man hangs poised in an airplane between lovers, or in “A Visitor,”
in which a mistress must bring her lover’s wife flowers.

Lau’s language is as explicit as it is poetic, yet this collection is
no voyeuristic or prurient tour of the so-called underworld of sex. The
woman-cum-dominatrix who emerges in the second half of the book asserts
that something is happening within and beyond the sadomasochistic
encounter —an encounter in which the categories of master and slave
are shown to be easily reversible.