Roy Kiyooka's Pear Tree Pomes--A Lit Pick for Asian Heritage Month

tall as a telephone pole and as old as the oldest house on
the block the pear tree lights up the whole sky above our alley
every spring and every fall it's a pear a day for every kid who
saunters down the alley -- something round to bite into some-
thing ripe to splatter the nearest garage door with.

Those are the opening lines of the Pear Tree Pomes by Roy Kiyooka, originally published in 1987 by Coach House Press, and paired with David Bolduc's illustrations. When the pear trees were in blossom a couple of weeks ago, and I found myself frequently wheeling by Kiyooka's old house on Keefer Street, I was moved to re-read this book. It's very small in scope (a few seasons meditating on a house and a backyard), yet lovely.

The book's structure works: winter, summer, the pear tree and the neighbours and children in the back alley -- each is a thread in the weave as the speaker's partnership unravels, and love comes to an end. The story is subtle, sad yet comforting, with something of the sweetness of life coming through succulent in all those pears (!): the bitten pear, the ripe pear, the speaker finishing the last of the preserved pears --his own pair ended and his lover now gone -- and reflecting on the morning years before:

we stood in the back-alley looking up
at its array of white blossoms and under out breath say
how lucky we are to find such a splendid clapboard
house with its own tall pear tree. eight brimfilled years
spoke to me as i put the last sliver in my mouth and
suckt up all the sweet pear juice.

The poems are just a sliver of Roy Kiyooka's history. He was a renowned visual artist; he was active in the Japanese redress movement and in the movements to save Strathcona rather than bulldoze its history for a freeway; and his teaching and writing career spanned many decades. But for me it is Kiyooka's passionate humanness--whether shown in his photographs of the worn gloves of workers (StoneD Gloves: Alms for Soft Palms), or in the personal glimpses of the Pear Tree Pomes--that make his work special.

Pear Tree Pomes was reprinted in 1997 within Pacific Windows: the Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka.

Photo by Joe Crawford.