Review of Shawn Hoo's Of the Florids
Of the Florids is Shawn Hoo’s debut chapbook and one of the winners of the Diode Editions chapbook prize. Despite the slimness of the volume, it reads with the veracity and presence of a full-length manuscript. As the title suggests, the collection delves into the natural history of the tropics as a climactic and ecological zone, though readers will quickly realise that “florid” in this case may be better understood as the ornate and the exuberantly excessive; or the “florid” as a diminutive of the Spanish “florida,” meaning “flowers.” Hoo’s subject matter and poetic style hark back to an earlier, and Eurocentric, appreciation of the tropics as an Edenic locale of abundance and great beauty, most prominently conveyed by the German traveller and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.
But as the opening poem “Referential” establishes, the intent of this chapbook is to unpick and short-circuit significatory links between nature, history and culture, with an emphasis on an urban, trans-linguistic subject. Natural history is anything but natural for the “city boy,” who is less “resident” and more a wordless, songless “residue” of their material environment. The bird in arrested flight becomes a metaphor for arrested speech, but, by the end of the poem, the non-linguistic noise of avian warbling is adopted, in metamorphosis, as the basis for joyful and excessive self-expression: “I warble at windows.” This transformation—of animals into images; of words into metaphors; of one language into another, or one plant into the next; and the human into the more-than-human—can be understood as the aesthetic argument of the volume.
Shawn Hoo, Of the Florids. Richmond, Virginia: Diode Editions, 2022.
The overall structure of the chapbook is anchored by three sequences, all titled “Natural History of the Florids.” Each reinterprets a moment in natural history from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning first with Thomas Stamford Raffles’ botanical endeavours, the Englishman grandly sub-contracts the tasks of representing nature in “Classify” and “Draw.” As in most colonial knowledge systems, these men are duly taxonomized according to the type of labour they perform. Quite refreshingly, Hoo veers away from the register of decolonial protest, choosing instead to celebrate the speed and lightness of the unnamed Chinese painter’s brush. In the next century, the scene is the famous zoo of Tokyo’s Ueno park, amidst a fascinating trans-local meditation on how zoos assign words in different languages to the same animals. Therefore “the London Zoo, in some ungrammatical language is an anagram of Ueno Zoo,” though this noise is anything but happy when war is revealed as another equaliser. “Eliminate” traces the deliberate massacre of the Ueno animals alongside “ten million of the species Homo Sapiens” in 1945. Locality is no defence against human-made disasters where the global and the climactic bleed into each other on the same scale. The last sequence reveals the gravitational pull of Singapore for this chapbook, by bringing the audience to Chek Jawa, a biodiverse coast on an offshore island once slated for reclamation. The sense of protest is to be found in Hoo’s poetics, where sharp allusions, gritty consonants and clipped end-rhymes lighten anger with an energetic sense of play. Despite its suspicion about referentiality, poetic noise is ultimately hopeful in speaking through and beyond such confrontations.
The author’s diverse talents as poet and translator are rendered in pieces such as “Deferred Sayings for the Next Century.” Throughout the collection, one detects a keen comparative perspective at work between different material and linguistic registers. But the most original poems in the chapbook are those which refuse translation in the narrow sense of interlinguistic equivalences. “Cicada Rhythms: Six Bogus Transcreations from Real World” is, as the title describes, a series of riffs on the music of various fictional cicada sub-species. The Notes to the chapbook further clarify these to be ekphrastic responses to a computerised music performance based on cicada sounds. But readers are invited to—dare I say—just have fun with the almost insufferable alliteration in each stanza to see what emerges when words as sound objects rub up against each other. For instance, from “V. Aphasic Cicada (Bisan),”
Artificial access ability. Assessing alimentary
Articulates. Avert, alluvial! Am assemblywoman.
The assonance of “ahs” reinvent the interminable, musical drawling of real-life cicadas as insistent and unreliable political sloganizing. There is certainly a sense of social critique in these lines but they are wittily and generously accomplished with humour.
The closing poem “Rewilding” exemplifies, once again, this topsy-turvy metamorphosis, which revels in the creative slippage of language to transform and reveal. Against the functional materialism of technocratic societies, this poem insists on letting flora and fauna inhabit our language and each other. Pineapples grow eyes and starfruit “misrecognise” the reflective bird-deterring CD discs for the sun, while the speaker of the poem, blinded in the left eye by chilli sauce, glimpses the return of the extinct white-bellied woodpecker perching on his window sill. Despite allusions to popular gay culture, in the form of the Rabbit God and “bodybuilding bodies,” Of the Florids is more excitingly read as queer ecology. Beyond human-centred questions of gender, the malleability of bodies and bio-boundaries implies a materialist poetics that goes beyond the constructivism of social categories.
However, Hoo’s volume is still mainly an excavation of nature as human-made artifact. As fascinating as this dive is into trans-local tropicality, Of the Florids relies on the representational richness of nature as taxidermied and rationalised through modern systems of knowledge. It attends to our non-committal and utilitarian perspectives on the natural world. But this reviewer wonders if the chapbook does help readers see, more clearly, the present ecologies of our natural environment. Perhaps that is an unfair expectation of a literary text which reflexively announces itself as a self-created artifact in the closing “Postscript: Torn Pages from The Discovery of the Florids.” Functioning as a voluntary dissection of its own poetics, some of the propositions on these two pages seem too eager to advance the point of reading such poetry. Other poems, such as the innovative bullet-point “They Won’t Stop, They Believe in Red” end too easily with an invocation of nature as lyrical refuge. The “patient bright breast” of the bullfinch in the last line echoes the exit wounds of the first stanza, but reduces the bird to figuration.
Of the Florids remains, nonetheless, an impressive debut well worth reading. Hoo’s chapbook comes in the wake of new work adopting an ecologically materialist idiom from Singapore and Malaysia, and Southeast Asia more broadly. These include The Orchid Folios by Mok Zining, Anything But Human by Daryl Lim Wei Jie, In Praise of Limes by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and The Geometry of Trees by Zhou Sivan. As a literati’s menagerie, Hoo’s writing eruditely restores life to language by plumbing the rich strata of the natural history archive—an archive that public discourse would typically consign to the museum or the laboratory.
Ann Ang is lecturer in English Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. She researches contemporary Anglophone writing from Southeast Asia and South Asia, and received her DPhil from Oxford University in 2022.