Seven Oaks Magazine.

Poetry is a battle of mitigating relationships between authors and audiences, nuances and palpability, or boundaries and conformity. The brief lines of packaged words build connections to the individual and a myriad of references or inferences, and this network can transmit a message of resistance pushing on our boundaries. The same system can be used to reinforce our socialization, stratification, or monogamous hetero-normative love.

Evelyn Lau takes us on a walking tour through Vancouver’s poignant geographical landmarks and emotional landmines in her narrative free verse collection of poetry, Treble. Simple imagery matches her delicate prose-like verse, which touches upon themes of love, family, adultery, loneliness, suicide, and heterosexual relationships. Her language and perspective convey personal experience that represents mainstream normative formations of female gender. In this respect, Treble presents conventional conflicts to women upon the first read. To navigate this, the landmarks in her poetry are recognizable for many Vancouver residents, which adds an even more personal framework for readers. Notable areas – such as English Bay with its annual fireworks, or the Downtown East Side as a shamble of lost dreams and suffering – situate the descriptions of broken institutions and lived experience.

Rather than writing sonnets on weddings, Lau has included the frailty of heterosexual relationships and monogamy in her pages of poems and the cover art of her book. She careens through the painful emotions caused by broken marriages and domesticity. Her writing describes roles that are still present, but asks to what extent these realities are changing in any meaningful way. The family dynamics and specifically “father-figure” relationships would suggest that there is still a craving to be supported, nurtured, and admired by our fathers as developing women. Yet this is based on a number of assumptions, and the same stanzas articulate resistance of the “female” subsistence on “male” archetypes.

There are a number of deaths in the book: self, marriage, family, and friendship. Throughout the collection, marriage is an institution narrated by Lau as having an unfortunate and tragic decline. She describes questionable relationships with men as cheating husbands or absent “father-figures”. Abscesses on Lau’s own heart are caused by intimate relationships or familial rapports. Her experience extends to the mistress theme, as she posits for the heartbreak felt by the romantic “other”. However, there are no deaths to the institutions of marriage, family, friendship, or self. The larger concepts and abstract forms of these relationships are not overtly refined, yet the practical context is resisted and shown to be defective.

There are no good guys or gals for Evelyn Lau. We’re all tragic and fallible creatures. Treble suggests, like Lau’s previous publications, that her work is largely autobiographical. I feel that this is the greatest asset of the collection.