BOOKS
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burden, not to be evaded through appeals to imagination, beauty, or
other transcendent motifs. For Mura, a third-generation Japanese–
American, history in the first instance is the narrative of his parents and
grandparents, which dominates the first section of the book: their efforts
to assimilate themselves to a new culture while maintaining their own;
above
all
their long sojourn in the "relocation camps" during World War
II. But history takes many other forms here as well: the life and death of
Pier Paolo Pasolini, tales of violence and betrayal in Hiroshima, Vietnam,
Soweto, the Phillipines, minor tragedies in the emergency room where
Mura's wife worked as an intern.
Atrocity is the keynote in
all
these histories, suffering on a scale that
challenges the imagination and perhaps threatens to disable it. Such ex–
tremity may be better met by the theoretical intellect, and one of the
traits that distinguishes Mura from Espada is his greater propensity for ab–
stract thinking, as his epigraphs from Benjamin and Adorno suggest. Here
the danger is that particular lives may become mere supporting evidence
for a cataclysmic theory of history. Throughout the book Mura relies on a
perhaps overly neat dialectic between pain and pleasure, history and hope,
or as the title of one poem puts it, "This Loss, This Brightness." Thus at
moments one feels that some avatar of Beauty has been dutifully trotted
out merely to provide a bit of relief from the relentless catalogue of hor–
rors, as when a woman writing on the Holocaust turns to nature for so–
lace:
"I knew that I couldn't write it with just Himrnler, the camps,
the corpses, there had to be more, these moments of release" -
a clarity of tears, sunlight; the aimless, unfolding
hills, a sapling, petunias, bending in the breeze.
Yet if the book is occasionally weakened by its tendency to schema–
tize and seek insufficiently realized alternatives to suffering, its power de–
rives equally from Mura's unflinching attention to the psychology of pain,
many varieties of which are anatomized. Some of these poems are
all
but
unbearable in their graphic depiction of bodily torment - such as a
nightmare Vietnam poem, "Lan Nguyen: The Uniform of Death," and
one about a South African township informant made to wear a burning
tire "necklace." Other poems explore more inward conditions: a man's
addiction to pornography and the loathing it engenders, the quiet
desperation of poisoned Hiroshima survivors and Japanese internees,
Pasolini's self-destructive political and sexual adventuring. In all these
cases it is the precise circumstance that interests Mura, the uniqueness of
each plight as it gathers nuance and detail; yet the sheer range of historical
