Carrie Etter reviews Marabou by Jane Yeh

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.

Marabou (Carcanet, £6.95)

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