The Consolations of a Garlanded Isle : The life of poet Garrett Hongo : VOLCANO: A Memoir of Hawai’i, <i> By Garrett Hongo (Knopf: $24; 339 pp.)</i>

The poet Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, a village on the Big Island of Hawaii. When he was 8 months old his parents moved with him to Oahu, and a few years later they moved again, settling on the mainland. Growing up in Los Angeles, Hongo learns almost nothing about his birthplace or his people. Family members are taciturn and evasive, and Hongo’s curiosity about the past is efficiently stifled. As for Japanese-American life during the second World War: “It was as if we had no history for four years and the relocation was something unspeakable.” In his early 30s, returning to Volcano for the first time, Hongo experiences an awakening: “I suddenly wanted to be better than I had been, more a part of the earth I was born to, its rock and garland of ferns, more a part of the history which had been kept from me out of some mysterious shame. . . .” Three years after that first visit, Hongo spends a year in a rented cottage in Volcano with his wife and infant son. After this he will return many times; his second son will be born there.

Out of his return to his homeland Hongo tells us he hoped to produce “a kind of sacred book--a book of origins.” His memoir is less the narrative of a life than the description of a struggle, and one finds more reflection and meditation here that event. At the heart of the struggle is the author’s profound yearning to connect to a place and to a culture. Uncertainty about where he belongs, the distance he feels from the world of his fathers, the family secrets and lies that have cut him off from his own past--all this has caused Hongo much suffering, and his book is intended to be, among other things, an account of his attempt to live with that suffering and to resolve his cultural identity crisis. His search for answers leads inevitably to an examination of the effects of displacement on other members of his family, his father particularly, and on those within the wider circle of the Japanese-American community.

Hongo believes to have found, back in Hawaii, “enough beauty and mystery to capture my mind and all of its energy for torture and pain and transform it into something like love--a love for natural beauty, an attachment to a local habitation, an inheritance of a name, my own family’s name. . . .” Part nature study, part family history, part self-help book, “Volcano” is most successful in its beautiful descriptions of the natural world and the relationships between that world and the aesthetic imagination, and in its moving, patiently detailed evocation of lost time regained. In an early chapter, Hongo writes of a visit he made soon after his arrival in Volcano, to a grocery store, where he recognizes, and dreamily catalogues, the island fruits and vegetables, the cans and boxes and product labels form his childhood. “The names of items, the brand names, and even the shapes they came in were like talismans I’d once relinquished which now rushed back to my hands, still faintly magical. . . .” (Thirty years have passed since that move, but a store clerk looks into the author’s face and identifies a Hongo.)

Hongo takes to heart Yeat’s assertion in his “Autobiography” that the poet who wishes to create a work that will last must first find metaphors in the natural landscape he was born to. This will give the reader some idea of the scope of Hongo’s ambition. And indeed this book’s greatest pleasures are its descriptions of that ravishing land of rain forest and live volcanoes. Hongo shows us hardened lava “like the thick, fattened bodies of walruses and sea lions,” flowers “like tiny Korean wedding gowns,” and moss-covered branches like “little green fingers--poised over a keyboard.” He has made a serious study of his native paradise, the better to regain it, and the writing here is passionate, wrought, often inspired--and occasionally strained, as in this description of the sky over the caldera of Kilauea: “crimson dreadlocks of nimbus clouds ganjaed over the sponsoring grove of relict trees.”

It was the death of his father Albert, we are told, that fixed Hongo’s desire to return to his roots. Albert had fled Volcano with his wife and son after his father died and Albert’s stepmother swindled him out of his half of the Hongo property, which included a general store. (Garrett Hongo was born in a back room of that store, but, typically, relatives kept up the lie that he was born in a hospital in Hilo, the nearest big town.) A factory worker whose lifelong hearing problems made communication difficult, Albert comes across in his only child’s memoir as a mournful figure, alienated and dispossessed, with an emptiness in him that nothing can fill. From what Hongo has been able to gather, Albert’s father Torau was something of a rogue. A drinker, a gambler and a womanizer, he mistreated the dancer who became his second wife and Albert’s mother until she ran away with another man, abandoning her children--just as she had been abandoned by her parents when she was a child.

“Volcano” contains a vivid account of coming of age in the immigrant community in Los Angeles in the ‘50s and ‘60s. First love: Hongo’s high-school romance with a Portuguese-American girl ends brutally, with a beating at the hands of outraged Japanese-American classmates. Hongo’s mother earns his undying resentment when she insists that he go to UCLA and train for a well-paying profession (model-minority style), scoffing at his dream of going away to a private college to study literature and philosophy. One day, after a fight with his mother, Hongo is driving his father’s BMW, screaming his bitterness and disappointment at Albert, who is riding beside him. Albert quietly opens the glove compartment, takes out the car registration and signed the BMW over to his son. “Dah Kaah yours now. You do what you want.”

Hongo ends up studying what he wants at Pomona College, the University of Michigan and the University of California at Irvine. Workshops in poetry leave him at first baffled and anxious. For Hongo, the pursuit of poetic subject and poetic form is inescapably bound up with his confusion about his cultural identity and his abiding sense of dislocation. A very funny chapter about a brief, humiliating stint as a comedy writer for a Hollywood production company proves nicely that, contrary to what everyone kept telling him, comic writing is indeed one of Hongo’s gifts.

Parts of this memoir are marred by the kind of psychologizing that seems to bring out the worst in writers. “I have decided that chronic dispiritedness is the result of being blocked from who you are, from knowing who you are. It separates you from feeling, fosters the modern kind of detachment that not only separates you from woe, which you may have a knowledge of and experience with, but from joy as well, which you may not know.” Whenever Hongo falls into this kind of language he begins italicizing words, sure sign that the writing lacks force.

“Chronic dispiritedness” has bedeviled Hongo all his life. In the last chapter he recalls how, once, standing alone for some cause at a faculty meeting at a school where he is teaching, and looking around and seeing that everyone else is white, he is struck yet again by the melancholy thought that he is “without that governing story of familial past everyone else has tucked like a pillow under their comforted hearts.” But the symptoms Hongo complains of--ennui, alienation, low self-esteem--are, of course, the classic symptoms of an affliction whose causes are multitudinous and whose victims are hardly limited to children of Diaspora and cultural displacement. Since childhood Hongo has known that books are the great weapon against that affliction. Another poet, Adam Zagajewski, writes: “Only in the beauty created by others is there consolation.” Hongo would add: and in the beauty of the natural world. It was his fortune to have been born not to the poor ugly urban streets where he was raised but to “a big chunk of the sublime.” His book of origins is a work of beauty and consolation.