Garrett Hongo's long-awaited third collection of poems is a beautiful,
elegiac gathering of his Japanese-American ancestors in their Hawaiian
landscape and a testament to the power of poetry, as it brings their
marginalized yet heroic narratives into the realm of art.
In Coral Road Hongo explores the history of the impermanent homeland
his ancestors found on the island of O'ahu after their immigration from
southern Japan, and meditates on the dramatic tales of the islands. In
sumptuous narrative poems he takes up strands of family stories and what
he calls "a long legacy of silence" about their experience as contract
laborers along the North Shore of the island. In the opening sequence,
he brings to life the story of his great-grandparents fleeing from one
plantation to another, finding their way by moonlight along coral roads
and railroad tracks. As his grandmother, a girl of ten with an infant on
her back, traverses "twelve-score stands of cane / chittering like small
birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind," Hongo asks,
"Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of
this history?" In fact, it is Hongo who guides himself--and us--as, in
these devoted acts of recollection, he seeks to dispel the dislocation
at the center of his legacy.
The love of art--making beauty in however provisional a culture--has
clearly been a guiding principle in Hongo's poetry. In this content-rich
verse, Hongo hearkens to and delivers "the luminous and the anecdotal,"
bringing forth a complete aesthetic experience from the shards that make
up a life.
