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Imagination Review by Alyce Wilson
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Tri Tran was born in Vietnam and is now living in the United States and writing in English. The poems in his self-published book, Imagination, rely heavily on the nature images which are common to poetry of the Far East. But his heavy reliance on these images overload his poetry with extraneous adjectives. He resorts to sentimentality and emotional adjectives to try to instill emotion in his poems. This does not have the intended effect, since these poems are often too abstract and clichéd to paint a vivid picture in the reader's mind. These lines from the poem "Freedom" illustrate:
Where Tri Tran shows potential is in those poems where he restrains this tendency towards flowery or abstract language, as in the final stanza in "Dawdling the Day":
Twice in the collection, he writes poems about giving up poetry and how painful that idea is for him: "I laid my pen to rest, a decade ago, / And buried my words as poetry died". And yet, there is no reason he should give up poetry. His eagerness to express himself on paper and his love of the lyric could portend good poems in the future. I would recommend he read more poetry, both in English and in his native language, and get a sense for how other people succesfully convey the sentiments he's trying to express. A great place to start would be the collection Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor. As I would tell any student in a poetry workshop, don't take the easy
way out. Strive for the more unusual language, for the challenges of approaching
language in a fresh way. And yes, keep writing. But more importantly,
start reading.
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