Joss: A History, Grace Yee
Giramondo Press, 2025

my father was not a gardener

but he was a handsome widespreading form descended from a
long-lived drought-resistant species.

every night he out-walked the doughnut boys ‘fuckin’ asians!’ out
in the street in their revved-up ford cortinas.

walking, he knew, was good for surveying the lie of the land and
building tolerance for life’s implacably white horizons.

in forty years, one hundred and twenty-five million steps graven
in the asphalt, relieving the pressure like a burr hole.

the woman he married was a graceful weeping habit (her beauties
severe and planed): a splendid courtyard specimen, unable to
grow in heavy soils.

nightly she waited for him: flashlight wedging the dark, bones
crumbling early, safe and dry.

discouraged by heavy staking and rectilinear boundaries, my
father, struck with leaves of variable light, was a legend among
biologists.

every evening he ventured into the wilderness, spade hands a
hundred feet deep in thought earth. the land he roamed was
densely populated:

sepia daughters, china, mother. heaving sea-plane, roiling ocean.
jock-the-border-collie flying in the rearview mirror. vauxhall viva.
blue.

dead brother. dead lover. whisky. codeine. lost keys a tilting door
nana mouskouri singing ‘you return to love’ carbon monoxide
filling his lungs like a lake in a bonsai forest.

rain hail sleet snow or interstellar dust, my father rode out to
orion’s belt in his sherlock hat, hohner harmonica + johnnie
walker + cat in tow. moths strumming the campfire.

when the embers fell, he’d pull up his collar and shuffle inside,
pausing a moment to gaze at the oak trees bathed in molasses on
the floors of the house.

Grace Yee

Early drafts of ‘my father was not a gardener’ were written in response to the word ‘solace’, a prompt I read somewhere – it might have been for a competition I ended up not entering.

The poem was inspired by my father, who suffered a stroke at the age of forty-four and during his rehabilitation, spent hours each day walking up and down the street. After he went back to work he continued walking, mostly in the evenings – it was a habit that kept him alive for decades, right up until the restrictions imposed by the pandemic in 2020 (he died in 2021).

He walked in all kinds of weather. In the winter, he would wear a thick scarf and the Sherlock hat with ear flaps that I bought for him in England. The stroke affected his balance: he had a wide-legged gait, more of a shuffle, slow but steady. Immediately after the stroke, he gave up cigarettes and took up chewing gum, so he’d walk and chew. Before the stroke, he’d been a whistler – after the stroke, he never whistled again.

At the time, it seemed to me that the stroke cleaved his life in two – before the stroke, he was young-ish and able-bodied and cheerful, and after, he became old and disabled and grumpy. I used to think the stroke was the most dramatic thing that ever happened to my father – but over the years, and after his passing at the age of 84, I came to realise that he had survived many upheavals, that the stroke was just one of them, and that even in the darkest underpasses of his life, there had been light.

My father was not a gardener: he had no patience for growing things for leisure or for work – he was never the stereotypical Chinese market gardener. But he did love poetry and philosophy and fiction and music and people and animals and nature. When I wrote that he was “struck by leaves of variable light, was a legend among biologists”, I meant that he was captivated by literature and trees, and the vast abstract and concrete worlds he lived in, and that despite his diminished capacity to engage, was in awe of it all.     

Grace Yee

A Poetry Shelf review

Grace Yee’s multi-award winning debut poetry collection, Chinese Fish, adapted her collection from the Creative Writing and Cultural Studies PhD thesis that she completed at the University of Melbourne. The collection is rich in multiple voices, braided narratives, cultural inheritances. It is a probing reaction to immigration, hierarchies, overt and covert racism, and emerges from daily living, personal experience, feeling, reflection, research and a tremendous love of words. Her writing draws upon and borrows from diverse sources: New Zealand archives including newspapers; nonfiction works on gender and women; songs, radio documentary. Seven poem sequences gather the overlapping subject matter, the motifs, the linguistic melodies.

I return to this earlier collection because Joss: A History, equally acute and probing, steps off from the foundation stones in her debut book to shine further vital light on Chinese communities, present and past, in Australasia. I see this new collection standing in for the ‘joss’ stick held high, with its connotations of the divine, as a move both to respect and to honour. It’s a collection held high for us to see, hear and feel the chorus of assembled voices. Grace has sourced, borrowed and adapted text from multiple settings: museums, news media, diaries, novels and nonfiction books (see her comprehensive endnotes). From these precious fragments she is excavating, exhuming, exposing the heartbreaking gaps and cliches. Together the voices establish a matrix. It’s a throb. It’s a poetic finger on the pulse of ideas, circumstances, erasures, narratives that link past to present in myriad slippery ways.

We are taken to the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo where a thousand plus ‘Chinamen’ are buried, many in unmarked graves, many with links back to south China’s Canton area. As Grace is discovering precious fragments in her reading and research, her discoveries – the buried, the eclipsed, the misrepresented, the exoticised – shift in the light and singe of her poetry. It’s poetry that is political, personal, shifting in form, layered with history yet never loosing touch with the present. And that is why this book matters so much. In these times. In these hard times where the past is a jagged edge in the gut and the heart of the present. And it needs to be. Grace reminds us the poem can be a vessel for thinking back, for carrying the pain of the world, for holding out possibilities for the paths forward. Poetry carries us beyond. Joss: A history carries us back and beyond, and that is a gift in this colonised world. Thank you.

Grace Yee was born in British Hong Kong, grew up in Ōtautahi, Aotearoa New Zealand and now lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologised in Australia and internationally. Her awards include the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award, a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria, and grants from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council for the Arts. She has taught in the creative writing programs at Deakin University, and at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her debut collection Chinese Fish won the 2024 Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her second collection, Joss: A History, was published by Giramondo in June 2025 and longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

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