Review of "Excess Baggage & Claim"

By Jaya Savige, The Australian, Oct. 3 2007

[P]ublished by Transit Lounge, Excess Baggage and Claim, co-authored by Melbourne-based Terry Jaensch and Singaporean poet Cyril Wong, presents the reader with a very different set of challenges, the nature of which makes this volume one of the most unnerving reads of recent years.

The collection, in two parts by Jaensch and Wong respectively, is essentially a no-holds-barred paean to the vicissitudes of love and longing, set against a backdrop of seedy karaoke bars, promiscuity and coruscating self-analysis. It is the result of a lengthy correspondence that eventually saw Jaensch travel to Singapore on an Asialink residency.

Jaensch introduces one of the volume's central themes, the protean nature of individual identity, in Leaf the Size of My Torso:

I approach myself from a variety
of angles
I delete
several spontaneous selves cast in bad light.
My task now is to cultivate one authentic self
from a series of predictabilities.

Like Hardacre's, Jaensch's voice is the locus for a collision between East and West and high and low culture, evident from the outset in his choice of epigraphs. The first, from the father of conservative politics, Edmund Burke -- "For only that which thwarts our will can be the cause of a grand and commanding conception" -- alludes to the baggage of the title; the second, a lyric from pop diva Beyonce -- "I don't think you're ready for this jelly" -- sets the work against the backdrop of the nightclub scene in the first years of the new millennium, and simultaneously throws down the gauntlet to readers who might be discomfited by some of the collection's more confronting subject matter.

Jaensch can be subtle about his sexuality when he wants to be: "Chinatown prepares for the new year, roosters line the streets" (from Karaoke -- Yangtze). At other times, he is less so: "To keep my cock limp I recite poetry/This country is like one/endless mall, beat, I tell the thirty-something/pole as he goes down on an inconsistency" (from Karaoke Booth 2).

But it is with Wong's contribution that the collection takes on a haunting tone. From the outset, the spectre of childhood sexual abuse looms large. The poem Don't Move -- "My father climbing/over me./How many boys would/know what that's like?" -- opens the suite, and each successive piece is testament to the destructive effects: "Is this/damage I must unstitch for the rest of my life?"

This is strong stuff, and while Wong's delivery is more direct than poems on the same subject by Sharon Olds, his unflinching, flinty voice is reminiscent of that North American writer. The poems have a devastating cumulative effect. Midway through the suite, the speaker observes:

A whore's capacity to seduce
is like a eunuch's influence in the Ming dynasty,
that strategic diversion from prejudice,
which shields them, even as they remain tethered,
love everywhere beyond the widening circles of their lives.

The pitch-perfect identification with the figure of the whore and that of the eunuch suggests the anguish at the heart of this book. Its subject matter, dark and vital, adds yet another thread to the rich cross-cultural conversation canvassed here.