Against Certain Capture

Against Certain Capture fuses biography and poetry, drawing readers into the lives of two women: Liang Yue-Xian and Eva Sounness - both Miriam Wei Wei Lo's grandmothers.

The first series of poems takes us to South-East Asia and China during the time of European colonialism and Japanese aggression, leading up to, and culminating in World War Two. Liang Yue Xian is a woman who manages, against the odds for Chinese women at the time, to gain an education, but her ambitions are thwarted by events beyond her control. She ends up in a turbulent marriage to a man who becomes a figure of some significance in political and business circles in post-colonial East Malaysia. Her search for meaning eventually leads to conversion to Christianity.

The second series of poems takes us to Western Australia, just after Federation. Eva Chester is born on the Kalgoorlie-Boulder goldfields, with both convict and free-settler ancestry. Her family moves to Albany when she is in her mid-teens. She too has ambitions to go to university, but these are scuttled by lack of funds and her father's ill-health. After teaching for a while, she marries a farmer from the Sounness clan in Mt Barker. They go on to have ten children. There are tensions between Eva and her mother-in-law, which lead to Eva's family moving to a farm next to the Stirling Ranges. Eva's tenth child is born with Down's Syndrome. Eva has a nervous breakdown following this birth and takes up art as a way of managing her depression.

Both grandmothers are surprised by the inter-cultural marriage between their children.

In terms of its poetry, Against Certain Capture is as much an exploration of form as it is an exploration of lives. The poet experiments with various forms, including the terza rima sonnet, the pantoum, and the headline poem.

The First edition of Against Certain Capture was published in 2004 by Five Islands Press, New Poets 10.

This Second edition is published by 5 Islands Press, now an imprint of Apothecary Archive.