China: Shockwaves

Betsy Struthers is a poet and novelist and the author of Found: A Body.

China: Shockwaves is the recreation in poems of Nancy-Gay Rotstein’s trips to China, Japan, and Europe. Travel poetry is notoriously difficult to write, to reach beyond the prosaic snapshots of landscape to the writer’s emotional experience of the journey. This book suffers an additional handicap — it is printed entirely in italics, which irritates the eye and demands a concentration the poems are unable to reward. For these are picture postcards, sun-face impressions jumbled together with no space for time or reflection. Everything is so predictable, the completely familiar Western response to the East: “I walk among debris: / masses strewn across tin belly / bodies line plank aisles / a human blanket / routinely scattered for privileged passage / to white cloth diner ... / revolutionaries smile from focal gallery / wary uniforms mark my interest / note-taking, feigned poster concentration / docile forms stir, uneasy …” (from “East Is Red Steamer”).

Here are mundane portraits of the Ugly American, the capitalists and academics who feast while multitudes starve. Here are the opium-smoking “ancients,” the grim communist functionaries, the uniformly-dressed but curious people. Here are the imperial ruins, the orderly factories, and the schoolrooms stamping out their products. Here in fact is everything one has come to expect from tourists to China, nothing startlingly new distinguishes this as a poet’s voice. It was probably an interesting trip, but for poetry I expect more insight, more subjective interpretation than these lists of adjectives.