An Open Book by Monica Dickens

An Open Book by Monica Dickens

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Introduction by Merlinda Bobis. All doors are open in Lucy Van's poetry. Ingress and egress are multiple, even coincident. We've just touched what's here, or are about to touch it, when apprehension is quickly unsettled, halted or reconfigured. Because we're only passing through a door or another door is opening, as the poet offers: 'Another thought though (and oh, I think about how thought and though are very similar words).' Hers is a liminal though. Between what's touched and what's yet to be touched. Site of frisson. Contention. Then insight.

The book opens to Hotel Grand Saigon: 'I have gone back and now I am here.' 'Back' is her father's family and roots in Vietnam, opening the door to his migration history, only a peek, though ('Never write a poem about a boat'), then opening to Vietnam's colonial history. And now we are here where the Vietnamese staff 'are always ready to serve' the French and other holidaying Europeans and white Australians, and herself, the Vietnamese Australian poet 'coming home, ' though also waited on or waiting in a gift shop and unable to ask, because she can't speak her father's language. Van's poetry is an ongoing decolonial passage. Each opened space and time takes to task the one just left, then comes home to the poet, her self-reflexive though pointing to her own entanglement. She's inside and outside these pasts and presents, or presences: touched and untouched.--Merlinda Bobis

Great granddaughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915-1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world in which she was brought up, she acted out - she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge. Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands, published in 1939.

Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but she continued to set the majority of her writing in Britain. No More Meadows, which she published in 1953, reflected her work with the NSPCC - she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children's books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals and, to some extent, children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.