Book
Sacred Vows
Sacred Vows is a 1998 bilingual book of poems by the Cambodian poet U Sam Oeur, translated from Khmer with Ken McCullough.[1] Many of its poems tell of the Khmer Rouge years, which Oeur and his family survived in six labor camps.[2][3]
About the poems
The poems span more than four decades, from the early 1950s to the years just before the book came out.[3] In "Oath of Allegiance", written at sixteen, Oeur vows never to betray his homeland.[3] Oeur set them in strict traditional Khmer forms with intricate rhyme, and he chants them aloud.[4][3] The title poem uses the "crow-hopping" form of laments: stanzas of seven lines, four words to a line, bound by end and internal rhymes.[4]
The book's longest section, "In the Concentration Camps", follows his years under the Khmer Rouge. McCullough noted that grief and despair lead there, yet irony and even whimsy run through many of the poems.[4] The poem "The Wheel Turns" tells of the family being driven out of Phnom Penh in April 1975. Another, "Water Buffalo, Cobra and the Prisoner of War" goes back to a day at the Boh Leave camp in November 1976.[5] The poem "The Loss of My Twins" is about his newborn twin daughters, who were killed at birth in one of the camps.[5][3]
Oeur draws on myth, story and history to comment, with irony, on Cambodia as it stood in the late 1990s, and his publisher says the poems foresee a return of freedom.[2] He hoped the book would lead young Cambodians back to their heritage.[2] Paul Hansen, reviewing it for Tricycle, read the poems as a Buddhist journey through the hells that ends in hope; the book closes with the line "Every strand is precious in the web of life."[3]
Publication
Oeur had destroyed his thesis and an 80-page poetry manuscript when the Khmer Rouge took power, and he came to Iowa in 1992 with only scraps of notes. Most of the poems were rebuilt from memory.[5][4] He and McCullough, classmates at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the 1960s, had translated about 170 pages by 1994.[4] An earlier chapbook of selections carried the Khmer title "Itinerant Poet" after his name.[4]
Coffee House Press in Minneapolis published the full book in 1998, with the Khmer poems and their English versions on facing pages, in 226 pages.[1][5] Marianne Villanueva, reviewing it for Education About Asia, called it an important piece of war literature that could open discussion in any high school class.[5]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Library of Congress catalog record, Sacred vows: poems (catalog record, undated)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Coffee House Press, Sacred Vows (publisher's page, undated)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Paul Hansen, review of Sacred Vows, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (Winter 1998)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Ken McCullough, introduction to poems by U Sam Oeur, Artful Dodge (Iowa City, June 20, 1994)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Marianne Villanueva, review of Sacred Vows, Education About Asia, volume 5, number 2 (September 30, 2000)