Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work, 1974-1988

by John Yau

A collection by John Yau.

Genres: Poetry

228 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1990

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

[PaperBird]

Did a review of this book here: https://youtu.be/5dtiXatuBLI

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading JY is like walking through the Louvre if it were a children’s museum where you’re allowed to touch all the “masterpieces.”

JY writings (poetry & criticism) use all of his five senses as his mind and spirit channel many other artistic mediums to investigate and to frolic intensely, genuinely, sensitively both the quotidian and the esoteric with equal facility.

JY is a poet who could be of a “school of poetry”; however, his words are a poetry that schools the reader anew with each of his poems... with, through, from, by, because of his deeply engaged, visceral linguistic lyricism.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bare Sheets II
225 ‘None of the words we summoned to our sides fitted what we said to each other. Words and phrases, like small birds, their pulsing colors, rose up and scattered in every direction. Frantic wings tore the remaining stars further and further apart. Although winter had claimed the city, the bay windows were still open. Night or something known by that name was soaking through the last porous layers of language we had left, the ones we imagined keeping from each other. It is time to start removing our skin, you whispered, its alphabet of disguises.’

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great Early Selected poems...Very Early I hope...it would be great if the poet stayed on the planet for another fifty years at least, and continued to write great poetry like that collected here...Le merveilleux is still alive and well...it just crossed over to this side of the Atlantic...

[Stu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yau's best works are vivid transformations and dredgings-up from memory and/or the unconscious. His weaker pieces, including many of the 'Dragon's Blood' poems, tend to come off as lazy, sloppy surrealism. But some of Yau's less successful efforts are still interesting in terms of formal experimentation--especially what I'd call his 'variations on a theme of variation'.

[YZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wrote a long paper on this. Would think it made me hate it, but no.

Liked most the tension between self-consciousness of being Asian-American writer and the resistance of slipping in anything "Asian" except in ironic manner. Reading too much into it? Like I said, wrote long paper.

[Paolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Yau is the Big Daddy of poetry, and this, his little parking lot of poems, demonstrates why.