Later, Vuong sits the reader down in a living room, making us privy to a family movie reel that is filled with images etched in terror and beauty. Vuong solidifies that the physical death of his mother will not overshadow her outline of a life lived he will hold her and the memories they created together in his body. Promise me you won’t vanish again, I said In the snow, the dry outline of my mother What we’ll always have is something we lost Vuong reveals early in the collection the peace he makes with the physical death of his mother. Time Is a Mother continues Vuong’s exploration and questioning of the meaning of grief, of family, and the toll it takes on the body and mind in the wake of the Vietnam War.
A central theme in Vuong’s work is his love for the woman who named him Ocean because “it’s the largest thing she knew / after god.” This line from “Dear Rose” is one of many intimate poems that return us to his first chapbook, Burnings his debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds and also to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel that takes the shape of a series of letters written by a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother. Ocean Vuong’s piercing Time Is a Mother, his second poetry collection, delves deeply into how he survives the death of his mother. THERE ARE MOMENTS when grief enters a body only to be released by that same body remembering that there is a life still to be lived.
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