Part 3...watching television with Lan one afternoon and seeing a program in which a herd of buffalo follow each other off a cliff, falling to their death. Its young protagonist, known as Little Dog, is born in Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, by his mother, Rose, who works in a nail parlour. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. The first in his family to read or write, he worries he has “squandered it on a degree in English”, but later finds validation as a successful poet. You need to be a subscriber to join the conversation. And honestly? We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Last year, the 30-year-old became the youngest ever winner of the T S Eliot Prize with his first poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, though by then he was already the subject of countless newspaper and magazine profiles. Vuong’s prose is peppered with aphorisms, philosophy and endless rhetorical questions (“What if art was not measured by quantity but ricochets? Later, allowing “you” to slide into a substitute for “I” (“Your head on Trevor’s chest”; a common tic in contemporary poetry) weakens a powerful device. Inside the wartime diary of her childhood confidante, Poetry Book of the Month: The Gilded Auction Block by Shane McCrae, The birth of the Spitfire: the wild air races that led to Britain’s greatest aircraft. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance. It’s a shame; throughout the first half, when “you” stands for his mother, a sense of real intimacy is created. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s debut novel, is just as elliptical, ambitious and – yes – poetic as its predecessor. Occasionally, the social commentary can be too glibly on the nose (“One nation under drugs, under drones”). Rand Club building, Between Loveday and Harrison The timeline below shows where the symbol The Buffalo appears in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”. Nothing to see here: why are writers so snooty about the suburbs? Find out more, The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Little Dog’s Vietnamese grandmother, who also shares their small flat, captures the boy’s imagination with stories of her wartime romance with his grandfather, an American soldier. Learning English (as he does at school, eager to interpret for his family) brings a similar feeling of visibility, but also a growing distance from his mother: “I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others could see my face, and yours.”, At home, Little Dog’s “mother tongue is stunted”: he speaks the rudimentary “second-grade” Vietnamese he learnt from his mother, whose education ended at five when a US napalm raid destroyed her school. On months when they managed to pay the bills, he tells us, the family would celebrate by dressing in their Sunday best to visit the shopping mall, then leave it with “our hands empty except for our hands”. The body, I mean.”, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is published by Cape at £12.99. An epistolary novel, it is written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother. Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning. 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