Saturday nights at the cocktail bar, Jackson and I
talk about history books. As if we’ll have any say in it at all.
– from ‘Curtain’
In Mad Diva, poet Cadence Chung takes us wheeling and diving through a scintillating whirl of ideas, experiences and imagery. Operatic in scale, by turns lush and spare, Mad Diva is a high-wire performance from an extraordinary emerging talent. This beautifully crafted collection confronts the chaos of life full on. The gorgeous jostles up against the grotesque. Romance and glamour have equal billing with the blood-streaked and the gritty. Scheherazade shares the back seat of a Wellington Uber; Samson’s in the bathroom getting a shave; Leilah on a plastic stage considers the history of ‘Chinamen on display’; Carmen suffers a real-life stab wound and sings the Habanera like a bat out of hell. Bejewelled, perfumed, mascaraed, satin-and-silked and never shy to be brazen or camp, the ever-unravelling divas in these poems are not interested in staying within assigned categories. In opera houses, art galleries, dive bars, bedrooms; in the purple light of Whitcoulls at dusk and in Wakefield Street at midnight, they keep on aiming for their high Cs, keep on testing the world for meaning, acceptance and love.