Foretokens

Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept – hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant – across continents and time. So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit?What unfolds is a personal Babel of voices and identities, and an examination of the contradictory legacies of colonialism, where poems – past and present – act as ‘foretokens’, omens of what lies ahead. A central spine of poems takes the molecular structure of DNA as its template: a ‘ladder of atoms beginning to twist’, down which the poet steps into the darkness of time. Objects of witness resurface to tell their own stories: fragile porcelains of past centuries transiting across continents; a picture calendar of old postcards from another world. ‘From the other side of ruin / we found safe passage’, Howe writes in these spectacular poems of emotional heft and quickening wit, their voice salvaged from the fragments of a former self. Foretokens is a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas.