Two poems by Jane Yeh established her as one of the several poets I look out for. One was about the explorer, Batholomew Diaz, and the other, I think, about a murder mystery. I should know because I thought I could find them but I can't. I would have made a terrible librarian.But I'm nothing if not brand loyal and being impressed to that extent twice is all it takes.
There is a further contender for that elite category in her latest book and it's called A Short History of Patience. Whether consciously or not, it brings to mind Wulf and Eadwacer, the Old English poem, with its evocations of absence,
Baby, I could go out on a limb
And say the evening's smoky eye draws near,
The floorboards creak like a harpsichord played wrong
At a time when poetry regards itself even more precious than it ever did, true successes that work as convincingly as this are to be treasured. It is an example of the workshop, creative writing industry and poetry competition world breaking out of its inward-looking 'poet's poetry' habit and offers itself to a potentially wider world. With degrees and a lectureship in Creative Writing and her books being of the type that win the prizes such training aims for, much of Discipline is a paragon example of that artfulness, a vogue that a review in yesterday's Times seemed to want to herald the beginning of the end of. While there is a place for all kinds of writing, every vogue has its day. Perhaps it was Hannah Sullivan's Three Poems winning last year's big prize that was the apex of this one.
It's not that I don't like it but one can feel intimidated by it, that one might have missed something in the cryptic play. As a letter to the TLS asked recently following the publication of Paul Muldoon's American Standard, when is he going to publish the answers.
It might already be too late for me to dissociate myself from the 'backward-looking' nature that Larkin was criticized for in his Oxford Book of C20th English Verse, and to assert that there is no avant garde/mainstream opposition but a wide river into which all poetry can flow but for all the reverence that Geoffrey Hill was accorded, no, poetry doesn't have to be difficult. It doesn't have to be easy, either.
Jane Yeh's poems are brilliantly imaginative and wide-ranging, perhaps ostensibly too much so sometimes, trying too hard if anything to impress with their range of reference, and are most effective when applying her linguistic invention to the mundane,
To be unloved is like listening to a progress report on courgettes - for months,
from Self-Portrait as a Spinster, and in Self-Portrait as New York in the Eighties,
We were poor
As a fake fur lined with fake fur
we might notice this layering of emptiness echoing the prose poem, These Movies,
This movie is like when you suddenly pull off a wig to reveal another wig underneath, which you were wearing all along.
But don't let's start on prose poems. Jane carries them off better than most because her baroque imagination can carry the vehicle rather than the vehicle being, well, simply prose.
It is to Carcanet's credit that they provide a striking cover illustration, as opposed to Faber who assume that being Faber means they don't have to. The high kitsch pink Cakeland might be thematic in its surface exuberance bravely disguising what both poet and reader know to be something superficial and recondite in our experience. It is vivid but has no depth.
And that is what the book, best read as a whole and not as individual poems, achieves. It is a highly elaborate and thoroughgoing analysis of shallowness. It isn't the poetry that is shallow.
Dislocation comes as standard. The blurb is right to highlight its 'deadpan humour and heartbreaking imagery'. I just wish it didn't also say it 'inhabits the space between the real and the surreal'. That is almost word for word the line I have in mind for writing a pastiche of terrible poetry reviews.
