Kaya Ortiz has a fascinating personal story. A Filipino-Australian, they experienced religious oppression in their home country and have journeyed for many years towards greater self-understanding of their queer identity. At least that’s what a reader may glean from reading their 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award-winning collection, Past & Parallel Lives.
A collection should, however, stand or fall on the basis of its poems, rather than the poet’s backstory. And, at their best, Ortiz’s poems are stunning. ‘Memoir’, ‘Dughan’, ‘Creation Story’ and ‘Etymology of paalam’ grab reader attention through a range of techniques and modes: the traditional (yearning) lyric, list poetry and works that combine forms and that include the Filipino languages, Bisayan and Tagalog.
Ortiz is a poet who describes themself as a “poet of in/articulate identities … and … obsessed with the fluidity of borders, memory and time”. It’s not surprising then that their poetry is strongest when escaping traditional forms. As well as the poems listed above, these include works such as ‘Un/compassed’, ‘Habi (Woven)’ and ‘Mask’. These poems eschew the traditional lyric and operate in prose poetry. They abandon traditional punctuation or have other layout forms that echo the shaking of borders of identity, geography and language that is the heart of Ortiz’s subject matter. When these poems are foregrounded by Ortiz’s recollections of childhood – including language, place and family – poems of significance emerge:
my grandparents write
in english
different mother tongues
somewhere it is flooding
letters in a battered suitcase
elsewhere it refuses to rain
water, stone, my bones
a grave in a coconut grove
a faded malong
is an archive
We continue to live in the age when the poetry collection must, for reasons of commerce, compete with the novel for page length. So, collections arrive that are too long and include poems that may be better if drafted further or considered as notes towards poems, rather than landing between book covers.
Ortiz’s collection includes such poems, along with several that cover the same emotional territory as each other – sharing syntax and form – but adding little that’s new to the collection’s ongoing revelation. And that’s important because Past & Parallel Lives isn’t a collection to dip into.
While, as the title suggests, linear time doesn’t govern the collection’s flow, the theme of personal revelation does, and so to do a grab bag from the collection would be to miss this feature. But because of it, the poems labouring points already made stymie the collection.
Another issue, which again speaks to the collection’s length, is the inclusion of many Star Trek-themed poems. Some of these are reasonably strong works and stand alone – i.e. non-Trekkies can enjoy the way in which the poet parallels their life experiences with characters on the Starship Enterprise. However, many poems in this suite sprinkled throughout the book don’t stand alone. If you’re not a Trekkie, good luck.
Read: Book review: Eden, Mark Brandi
If the Trekkie poems had their own chapbook, several traditional lyrics were shaken up and stirred, and the poems that cover the same emotional terroir were removed, Past & Parallel Lives would be a stronger, though shorter collection. As it stands, it remains a powerful first collection, but the reader must stay patient and wait for the diamonds of which Ortiz is capable to come into view.
Past & Parallel Lives, Kaya Ortiz
Publisher: UWAP
ISBN: 9781760802981
Format: Paperback
Pages: 90pp
Release date: 8 March 2025
RRP: 24.99
