Marabou

Marabou, Jane Yeh's first book of poems, is a meditation on the nature of artifice, and on the self. Her snapshots freeze fraught instants in the lives of a broad cast of characters: the horror movie mummy, an Elizabethan shoemaker, a flock of Cumbrian sheep; there's Harry Potter's owl and Oscar Wilde, two European princesses... In these beautifully crafted poems, her personae address the themes of love, lust, glamour and desperation with wit and flair. Hers is the language of fashion, espionage, revenge tragedy; her taut pressure-packed lines combine vivid detail and bold confession and reach unexpected emotional truths.

Table of Contents:
I Correspondence Double Wedding, 1615 The Pre-Raphaelites Adultery Convent at Haarlem Cumbria The Only Confirmed Cast Member Is Ook the Owl, Who Has Been Tapped To Play the Snowy White Owl Who Delivers Mail for Harry II Bad Quarto Telegraphic Monster Paris, 1899 Teen Spies Biological Blue China Love in a Cold Climate I Love in a Cold Climate II Divining France, 1919 Substitution Defence Portrait at Windsor Seaside Resorts Parliament of Fowls House Fête Champêtre Vesuvius (In the Priests' Quarters) III Shoemaker's Holiday Revenger's Tragedy Rhode Island Waltz Alchemy Exercises Self-Portrait After Vermeer Notes

About the Author :
Jane Yeh was born in America and has lived in London since 2002. She holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from Harvard, Iowa, Manchester Metropolitan, and Royal Holloway London universities. Her first collection of poems, Marabou (Carcanet, 2005), was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward, and Aldeburgh poetry prizes. She was named a Next Generation poet by the Poetry Book Society for her second collection, The Ninjas (Carcanet, 2012). A Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University, she also writes on books, theatre, and fashion for such publications as The Poetry Review and The Village Voice. Author headshot by Andy Frost.

Review :
2nd October 2005 The American poet Jane Yeh's poetry, flitting from one thought to the next, is compact and funny (peculiar and ha ha). Marabou gives voice to the trapped: a Pompeiian priest caught by Vesuvius, 17th-century royals 'laced taut / As an archer's bow', women in a Watteau painting 'swaddled in frocks'. Meanwhile, contemporary figures button and unbutton a blue housecoat in frustration or plot revenge while awaiting a loved one's letter. This tight fit of form and content is never intolerable because Yeh has serious fun with her material. There is an alert, impish intelligence evident in these poems' bizarre first lines ('It seems unfar to the sheep', 'First I blindfolded the revolting cat'), their twists and turns, the startling imagery ('Boats landed at Hastings like bats coming home / Their nose questioned me pointedly') and the accompanying handful of notes, one of which reveals the unreliability of a poem's details. Concealment is another theme, with pieces about teenage spies and water diviners; and when Yeh dons animals' disguises, she manages to avoid sounding like Ted Hughes or Les Murray. Marabou is fresh and surprising. If only all first books were this unusual. Carrie Etter, Tower Poetry, December 2005 Despite its cover's suggestions to the contrary, Marabou reads more as a collection of individual poems than a book developing one or more particular themes. Jane Yeh's inventiveness and linguistic precision distinguish the poems, making their variety all the sharper. Yeh employs dramatic monologue frequently, with an impressive range of speakers, including Pre-Raphaelite artists' models, seventeenth-century Dutch nuns, and a Roman priest about to die in the eruption of Vesuvius. When the latter relates, "We were kneeling / When it hit. Through the window // I saw its hand," Yeh well evinces the speaker's religious sensibility, imagining the catastrophe as a divine act. Interestingly, Yeh's dramatic monologues extend beyond the usual human characters. Animals speak in "Cumbria" and "The Only Confirmed Cast Member Is Ook the Owl, Who Has Been Tapped To Play the Snowy White Owl Who Delivers Mail for Harry," and objects come to life in "Bad Quarto" and "Bad China." Uniquely "Portrait at Windsor" collapses object and person, with a speaker who is both a long dead queen and her likeness. This is no static picture, but as the epigraph indicates, one that burned in the 1992 fire at Windsor Castle; the painting burns as the poem progresses, so that the voice speaks as it perishes. It concludes: For four hundred and sixty-one years I have been a queen. I shall go out In the uneven light, fading By the flaring light of the heart of one November, beating Out the hours of the afternoon of a year gone to ash. For four hundred and sixty-one years, I kept This place. There will not be another. While the dramatic monologues range widely in time, place, and character, many of the collection's remaining poems address a contemporary romantic relationship in unsentimental terms. "Love in a Cold Climate I" and "Love in a Cold Climate II" compare with sonnets in their subject matter and structure, with the former in seven couplets and the latter in two quatrains and two tercets.The first of the pair proves more effective for its greater focus, presenting a couple driving through the northeastern United States, in the area fittingly named New England with its own Manchester, Worcester, Cambridge, and Greenwich. In this poem, to experience love in a cold climate means to appreciate one another's humanity amid an indifferent if not menacing landscape. Whether it treats the animate or inanimate, past or present, historical or personal, Yeh intensifies each voice through concise expression, taut lines, and meticulous use of language--an especially high standard for a first book. Peter Temple, The Age (Australia), 17th December 2005 A Year of reading pleasurably This year was also a good one for poetry...The American poet Jane Yeh's Marabou was a real find. She has a gift for startling lines and a wonderful sense of humour. William Wootten, The Times Literary Supplement, 5th May, 2006: A guide in a glowing frame Perhaps Jane Yeh's poems shouldn't surprise us as much as they do. After all, the injunction to write from an unusual point of view, to be inspired by a newspaper article or painting is fairly standard in creative writing workshops. Nevertheless, the poems in what is Jane Yeh's first full-length volume jump out, not by seeming more natural than one would expect, but by being mannered and artificial in a way that turns such epithets to compliments. Though her transatlantic idiom and subject matter may give away the fact that Yeh is an American poet who now lives in England, you can't tell much for sure about Yeh's personal circumstances from her poems. Instead, she is caught up in her portrayal of humans, animals and objects, from a seventeenth-century Dutch nun to Ook the owl star of the first Harry Potter film. But Yeh never really disappears; for while she writes dramatic monologues, her own idiosyncratic style is always sparking off her adopted idiom and assumptions. Thus the speaker of 'Paris, 1899' is, and is not, Oscar Wilde in his last days, but manifests a sort of melancholy Wilde-Yeh hybrid. The living corpse in 'Monster', coming back 'With a trash artist's vengeance, hieratic in eyeliner', is one third Yeh, one third mummy and one third Norma Desmond. When 'Substitution' begins with "First I blindfolded the revolting cat", it starts as it intends to go on. The protagonist recalls how she dealt with the "Usurper": It was necessary, moreover, to expand my Girth. Before, I had been on a private hunger strike To protest her fleshy bargains. More funny peculiar than funny ha ha, such jerky, unhinged grandiloquence won't be to everybody's taste. Nor, I suspect, will the tale of how she replaced the Usurper's belongings with replicas and learned "to draw small shrews in 1,126 positions". However, give 'Substitution' the time of day and there's a perceptive tale of jealousy and imitation lurking beneath weirdery, and a witty and original voice shaping all the quirks. Yeh's talent for arresting first sentences, and for subsequent sentences that read like them, is there in 'Cumbria': It seems unfair to the sheep. Now that the cull's on, they haven't a chance. They can't help being round, contagious, and woolly. Ghostly herds bobble slowly down the track. Though the insistent endstopping is pointedly formal, its paratactic effect is reminiscent of more avant-garde practice. For while each sentence follows logically enough on from the last, each has a slightly different register, leaving the reader wondering if this is one strange voice or the effect of four different voices spliced together. The issue is not resolved, for the poem soon switches to the point of view of speakers who appear to be the unhappy sheep in question. The tight-laced match between form and content is also there in the way Yeh will pull her subjects over an enjambement, as in 'Ftte Champttre', which mimics Watteau by depicting women in frocks with "Pale pink, hyacinth, old gold, flickering / Silver in the creases of their vanishing limbs." Such practice is congruent with the way Yeh will write of nature constricted to precarioius elegance, of latticed roses; or Anne of Austria and Isabella of Bourbon on their way to their double wedding "hooped" "like gigantic orchids". Similarly, Yeh's protagonists, whether they be aristocrats or "teen spies", are both revealed and hidden by the clothes, clichss and codes they get themselves up in. The fine frames and varnish that Jane Yeh gives her lives and histories have their fragilities; as does the aestheticism that attends them. But it's also true that Yeh sees the flames lapping the museum. 'Blue China' witnesses the Fire of London and the 1809 collapse of Brighton Pavillion (a collapse which, a note tells us, never took place); 'Portrait at Windsor' presents the thoughts of one of the Queen's paintings as it combusts; 'Versuvius (In the Priest's Quarters)' gives us the last moments of someone made artefact by that disaster. Yeh's more distant perpectives, the ability to see things pass "in geological time" or in the lifetime of an object, the way she will register how a radiometer responds to events, end up impressing almost as much as the more overt oddities of viewpoint. Jane Yeh's shifting and unnatural world may not be a bad guide to the one the rest of us inhabit. Herbert Lomas, Ambit Magazine, Spring 2006: Things often speak in these poems. They speak obliquely, I take it, for the life and death of the poet, and for everyone's life. A painting, caught in a Windsor Castle fire, says 'The great heat sets my face to cracking. A web of wrinkles creeps across me... I came new-gilt, / True-grained, cut from the very heart/ Of the trunk... I shall go out / In the uneven light...' Svvres china that had been through the Great Fire of 1666 claims 'My descent can be traced to a flawed set of plate - Delft in retrograde, Wedgwood rising...' I take this 'Blue China' to speak of the catastrophic history of China. As Stephen Dedalus said, 'History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to wake.' Not all the poems are indirect. 'I've gotten nothing for weeks,' writes a deserted woman. But the imagery takes off: 'When your letter comes, the dogs will bark / Up and down the street. The tomatoes in the garden / Will explode like fireworks...' 'I could beg but I don't have to,' writes another; but some of the persona's thoughts become a little difficult to follow: '...if strapless / Were to "having it" as bang-up is to "done that" / Would my position be worth a flutter?' But this is part of the drama, and drama is Yeh's style. The personae include a seventeenth century Haarlemn nun, Cumbrian sheep, Ook the Owl, who is to play Snowy White Owl in the Harry potter film, teenage spies, Chinese students studying how to be french in 1919 Paris, an alchemist, and someone writing a 'Self-Portrait After Vermeer.' This is a very unusual and powerful imagination with the witty linguistic skill to mathc. It yokes together heterogenous ideas and explores a full range of territory from the Renaissance to the Pennines and seaside resorts. To enjoy it you'll occasionally need a little of The Times crossword puzzler's patience, but it will be rewarding and give insights into a rich experience of being human. Jane Yeh's interest is in stories, from the tale of Harry Potter's owl to the royal marriage of 17th century princesses and a Cumbrian sheep. These poems dance in very formal patterns, and are very controlled. Sometimes the control seems a little too tight - an over-laced crinoline perhaps. The way she enjambs between free verse couplets in many of the poems is very interesting and i think she has probably got a lot more to say. Here's a taster from 'Double Wedding', 1615: We are laced taut As an archer's bow strung with catgut, a lean And deadly spring to the touch. at each breath Our stomachs press whalebone, seven beat fingers Stiff as our own ribs and wrapped in linen, leaving The fine print of their weave on our skin. we are wired... The couplets and the enjambment here give a sense of emotion trapped by the whalebone of courtesy, and she is excellent at the sense of emotion controlled by politeness. She's still a young poet, but i think she will grow into a very interesting poet. “A natural / Craver of attention” and “A professional moaner,” Jane Yeh announces herself as a bold, seductively moody practitioner of the dramatic monologue in Marabou, her impressive first book. Yeh’s poetic acumen ensures that these poems—abounding with historical and imaginary characters, from Anne of Austria to a teen spy and rare ceramics—focus not on the eccentricity of their subject matter but on the dilemma of creating a voice. The self-described “disappearing girl” of “The Pre-Raphaelites” asks “Why am I, why am I caught / In the hinge of this world . . .?” while a shoemaker coyly explains himself, “if I am, on occasion, a touch / Temperamental it might be because I was kitted-out / For frivolity.” Readers will experience something akin to vertigo in Yeh’s audacious enjambments, which, in their sudden swerving, adds another jolt to her verbal intensity. What becomes clear in Marabou is that artifice, linguistic or otherwise, appears at first to shape identity but in the end reveals it to be radically mutable. This has insidious consequences, as is evident in the ambitious “Substitution,” which charts the uneasy transference of power from master to slave. Yeh balances cleverness (“the Usurper’s signature scent, Hypnosis”) with the unsettling: “Eventually I could not be distinguished from the Usurper. The way to tell us apart // Is that she is evil and smiles only at her slaves. Also the way to tell us apart // Is that she is controller of the slaves, which is what I should rightfully be.” Throughout Marabou Yeh’s speakers resist who they “should rightfully be” and slyly acknowledge that the poetic I is more limitless than limiting. But if Yeh’s masterful ventriloquism often suggests the liberty and thrill of inhabiting multiple identities, “Substitution” coolly reminds us that the differencing work of impersonation might ultimately highlight the fungibility of identities, an idea exploited by those who seek simultaneously to reinforce identity and to render difference and particularity irrelevant.