Coral Road

Garrett Hongo's long-awaited third collection of poems continues his literary explorations into the history of the impermanent homeland his immigrant ancestors found in Hawai'i. In these sumptuous narrative poems, Hongo meditates on the gorgeous landscapes and dramatic tales of the islands; he takes up strands of family stories and what he calls "a long legacy of silence" about their experience as contract laborers along the North Shore of O'ahu. In the opening sequence, he brings to life his great-grandparents fleeing from one plantation to another, finding their way by moonlight along coral roads and railroad tracks. As his grandmother, a girl of ten with an infant on her back, traverses "twelve score stands of cane / Chittering like small birds, nocturnal harpies in the feral constancies of wind," Hongo asks, "Where is the Virgil who might lead me through the shallow underworld of this history?" In fact, it is Hongo who guides himself--and us--as, in these devoted acts of...