Borrowed Love Poems

by John Yau

If the "I" cannot be representative, what or who can it represent? In John Yau's new collection, Borrowed Love Poems, the reader encounters artists (Hiroshige and Eva Hesse), poets (Marina Tsvetayeva and Georg Trakl), actors (Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre), and memorable figures (a retired wrestler and a private eye named Genghis Chan). Each becomes a spectral, sonorous presence inhabiting the polymorphic body of the page, a shadow of a shadow lit from within. Yau's poems are dazzling explorations of the multiple, shifting sands of identity, of the fictional, fake, factual, and autobiographical selves that pass like ghosts through the empty space known as "I." Able to seamlessly merge a strict yet eccentric methodology with wild flights of the imagination, Yau moves into a rich, complex realm, where the flickering edges of consciousness-the dream state-become poetry.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2002

About the author

John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly allusive and ironically referential, Yau's background as an art critic clearly comes to play in this collection: Yau also has a wry sense of humor, which one can see clearly with lines like "I wasn't always a fevered lepidopterist." From Peter Lorre to Genghis Khan, knowing Yau's reference do add the richness "borrowed" in his love poems. A fascinating collection.

[Maxfield Francis Goldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these are Brilliant— others, not so much. The Vowel Sonatas really did not do it for me; they felt like the nuclear descendant of Ashbery's anthropomorphized toenail clippings. But inventions of genius are sparked up by moments such as "His first reaction was normal/Gold threads lead a dragon into a crayon chimney/ Two mirrors—empty as teardrops—/ Emerege from beneath tomorrow's ruined sky." Yau has a powerful command of the abstract concrete image, and uses it well in Another Late Tale, which is almost undoubtedly about Joespeh Cornell, about whom I've spent the past few months reading, meaning that opening a poem with "homage: utopia parkway collagist," signifies a conversation with the scavenger-oriented statement of curation posited in Cornell's Boxes; perhaps, this is what's borrowed about Borrowed Love Poems— found images placed in conversation with one another, glued into various poetic forms, just as Cornell fixed his birds and glass bottles and doll heads to his boxes, Yau has selected discrete fragments of experience and placed them into the poem as if to test forms ability to tolerate an overloaded, and sometimes discordant harmony of dialectics.

[Annelie · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Yau's writing is truly inimitable. He writes poetry the way that an artist paints, and in this his career in art criticism and curation are best expressed. Rather than communicating coherent ideas, Yau's poetry is more concerned with how language looks and sounds together. His abandonment of logic and comprehensibility enables him to create images that, to me, captures more poignantly the beauty and uniqueness of the world.

I'm sure a common criticism of Yau's poetry is that anyone can mash a bunch of words together and call it a poem, as he has; however, I dare anyone to make as expansive a use of the English language. I'm not really sure what I got out of these poems, but one thing for sure is that by reading John Yau I have learned to view poetry in a different way, with possibilities that have been largely abandoned today as poetry is more commonly used for expression of individual experience. That's fine, and I would definitely not like if every poem was an elusive as Yau's; however, his oeuvre scratches an itch for me as someone who loves the English language.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was yesterday's random pull from my poetry shelves - I read it a couple or three times when it came out. I would really like to divide the poems into three sections, each with it's own ranking. One section for I really liked it, one for I liked it, and one for just OK.

[Emma Bolden · Rating 3 out of 5]

The borrowed love poem parts? Absolutely exquisite. I admit I didn't love the other few series in the collection, but it might be because I loved the borrowed ones so much.