"What cargo / do I carry / What weapons / have I held": So begins Steffi Tad-y's debut poetry collection, From the Shoreline — a dreamy introspection that rests in the delicate space between the internal and external. On one level, the Manila native and UBC alum lays bare for the rest of us how mental health and the diasporic experience interweave. On another level, she struggles to come to terms with it herself. All throughout, the journey is, by turns, intensely vulnerable, heartfelt and bittersweet.
The first thing you notice about Tad-y’s poetry is the imagery. Her words come in sparse, punchy vignettes, firmly grounded in the world around her. Shoreline skips its way from past to present, from the tropical Philippines of Tad-y’s childhood to Mount Pleasant, and stops to smell the flowers along the way. Whether it is about jacaranda blooms like a “flock of firebirds in the freeway,” or her father’s accented voice like waves on the water, each evocative, unconventional metaphor draws the reader a step further into her world.
This is likely when Tad-y is at her most effective; in grounding loftier ideas like the impact of colonialism in highly sensory, emotional anecdotes, she proves herself to be a surprisingly incisive historian. Her accounts run the gamut from wistful to frustrated — sometimes simultaneously — while she carefully avoids the nostalgic impulse to simplify or lionize her story. Only a few lines after proclaiming her desire to “probe / what centuries of being owned / catapults into a psyche,” Tad-y admits that perhaps simply naming the answer isn’t enough to get rid of it.
Neither does she make herself out to be a perfect patriot; the sardonically-titled “The Country I Come From Is Called The Temp Agency Of The Planet” contends with both her defensive indignation at having assumptions made about her culture, and the secret, shamefaced desire to escape that history and its associations entirely. That she tries to include all these contrasting facets of the experience is certainly a noble endeavour, one that makes her voice seem even more honest.
There are, however, occupational hazards to attempting to trace and convey such a tangled experience. While Tad-y's imagery is generally evocative enough to keep the reader along for the ride, some sections of childhood memory risk breaking immersion for a quick Google search. What’s more, Tad-y’s progression through the halves can be a little hard to follow. Though splitting the collection in two allows for a level of thematic organization, readers might be better served by simply allowing the poems to reach them as they come.
Nevertheless, the second half of Shoreline seems to have settled into itself. There is a warmth here, away from the searching questions of Part I — a bit of earlier polish is exchanged for more immediacy but it’s worth it for the sense of fond recollection that fills Tad-y’s verse. Both “Prayer at Grad Party” and “Real Talk” are straightforward and surprising in their adolescent awkwardness, but somehow the invocations of both Jesus and The Cranberries only make Tad-y’s earnestness stand out even more. “I don’t want you to forgive me,” she writes. “Please come / see me & her & how we eat. / The music we are.”
Indeed, forgiveness seems to have already come, if it was ever really needed in the first place. Perhaps the most touching moment — and the one that best summarizes the entire collection — occurs in the poem “Flickering.” In it, Tad-y places herself and a long-lost uncle on a beach. There, the two of them reassure each other, reflecting on their regrets and what it means to keep moving forward after everything. Tad-y writes, “From the shoreline, we’d recount what we love. / Here is some honey for the wound. Here are your butterflies.”
At its heart, From the Shoreline is about making peace with yourself by understanding how you came to be. As the readers muddle our way through one crisis after another, trying to make sense of what we have or haven’t done, the butterflies aren’t just for Tad-y — they’re for us, too.