Joy Kogawa’s Searching, Unflinching Poetry

• From the Lost and Found Department: New and Selected Poems
• Joy Kogawa
• McClelland & Stewart (2023)

Vancouver-born, Toronto-based poet and novelist Joy Kogawa is now 88 years old, and she’s just published her 16th book. From the Lost and Found Department: New and Selected Poems is a poetry collection featuring work from across Kogawa’s expansive, influential career that built a foundation for generations of writers of Japanese descent.

In an essay introducing the book, fourth-generation Japanese American author Brandon Shimoda wrote, “As I think of the poems that unfold for me a map of how to be a Nikkei westerner, a Yonsei poet, of how to look long to the high hillside grave of ancestors and at what is growing at breath’s-length, I see Joy Kogawa, radiant with expectancy, waiting her turn to root meticulously through a collection of suspended debris, to recognize, hopefully and miraculously, her own.”

“Joy Kogawa was the first writer of Japanese descent, born and who lived outside of Japan, who I read, who I had heard of,” Shimoda wrote.

Kogawa lit a path that few had walked before. Her seminal writing about the exile and internment of her family into rural British Columbia during the Second World War opened the door for generations of people to understand the impacts of the incarceration of Japanese people in North America.

Kogawa was six years old when she and her family were forced to leave their Vancouver home for an internment camp for Japanese Canadians in Slocan, B.C. They later resettled in Coaldale, Alberta, where Kogawa finished high school. “Fundamental to awareness is loss, to intimacy, loss,” writes Shimoda. “Something occurs to me while reading From the Lost and Found Department: that when you spend your life, or a good portion of it, looking — reaching — for someone or something that is out of reach, you find yourself in deeper relation with who and what is around you.”

A depth of absence — of home, of belonging — shaped Kogawa’s early life, and those foundational losses invert themselves on the page in the form of poetry that demands that its readers pay close attention to the present moment. Her work endures for its arresting, visceral qualities. Kogawa’s intimate scenes of care work and aging, of deep friendship and insatiable love are assertive responses to the intractable grief that underscores many of the relationships and experiences that make us who we are.

It is writing rooted in a careful attunement to the fleshy noisiness of being human, and to moments of tenderness that are as redemptive as they are quotidian. At the core of the wide-ranging collection is Kogawa’s unflinching sense of what makes a life, and what we’ll miss the most when we’re gone.

From the Lost and Found Department features several poems about friendship, some of which Kogawa dedicates to her friends. The late Japanese Canadian painter and poet Roy Kiyooka died in Vancouver in 1994. He was part of a wide-ranging community of artists and activists who were Kogawa’s contemporaries.

for roy kiyooka

we never said goodbye
roy but you sudden as disappearance
were the way of the maze full of energy

roy as birdcry and windsong roy as
audacity dancing as goodbye

mistress muse mistress music
gather your alphabet singer
meticulous shaper and scraper
of wordbones your scaler of timewalls
your seer your painter of pear trees
and shadows

here in this january mourning wave our
last telephone small words okay seeya
and click the tiny amen taking it for granted

Kogawa’s poetry invokes images of family and kinship too. She dedicated From the Lost and Found Department to her parents, and the newer poems in the collection include writing about her daughter and her partner.

for deidre jan

my little girl sweet singing
four-year-old, hands clasped, pudgy baby i
long for her though now fully fledged
mother barn swallow still singing
through foraging skies sleek and sinewy
and bringing nourishment to her straw nest
her wide open-beaked babies my doting
mother/child with as much attentiveness
as this world affords, my one my only
daughter when is daughter’s day

on memory loss

let’s not rush to retirement homes
while leaves and autumn still leave
in late november our limbs
less limber less spritely though
not yet brittle not yet

It’s moving to see works of poetry written across a lifetime in one collection. Some of my favourite poems in From the Lost and Found Department are Kogawa’s earlier works for their depictions of life in Vancouver and Toronto.

May 3, 1981

I’m watching the flapping
green ferry flag on the
way to Victoria —
the white dogwood flower
centred by a yellow dot.

A small yellow dot
in a B.C. ferry boat —

In the Vancouver Daily Province
a headline today reads
“Western Canada Hatred
Due to Racism.”

Ah my British
British Columbia, my
first brief home.

“In time, every portrait becomes an elegy. To the one written. To the one, through the love they feel for others, writing,” writes Brandon Shimoda in Lost and Found’s opening essay. “What you look at, you become. What looks at you becomes you. It comes all at once, unhurriedly.”

To read Kogawa’s poetry today, in November 2023, feels like a lucky offering. It’s rare to witness the span of a life so closely observed. And a gift to let it change you.

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Excerpted from ‘From the Lost and Found Department: New and Selected Poems’ by Joy Kogawa. Copyright 2023 Joy Kogawa. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd. Excerpted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.