Marabou

by Jane Yeh

A meditation on the nature of artifice and on the self, this collection of beautifully crafted poems addresses themes of love, lust, glamour, and desperation with wit and flair. Featuring a broad cast of characters, from Harry Potter’s owl to Oscar Wilde, these poems combine vivid detail and bold confessions to reach unexpected emotional truths.

Genres: Poetry

51 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Jane Yeh is a poet and journalist. Her first collection of poems, Marabou (Carcanet, 2005), was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Forward, and Aldeburgh poetry prizes. Her next collection, The Ninjas, was published by Carcanet in 2012. She was a judge for the 2013 National Poetry Competition and was named a Next Generation poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014. Her poems have appeared in The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Nation (US), Poetry Review, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including The Best British Poetry 2012 and The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 and 2006.

Jane was educated at Harvard University and holds master’s degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa and Manchester Metropolitan University. Before coming to the Open University, she was a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston and Oxford Brookes universities, and was Co-Director of the MA in Creative Writing Programme at the latter. As a journalist, she writes on books, theatre, fashion, and sport for such publications as The Times Literary Supplement, Time Out, and The Village Voice (US).

Reviews

[Sam Bizarrus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeh is truly one of the most talented and creative poetic voices of this generation. Her sensibility is divine. Often, the word "baroque" is used to describe a certain strain of contemporary poetry whose verbal density and rich imagery conjure splendor. Yeh's writing feels altogether more Mannerist. While her lexicon of references extends from the early modern to the present day, this collection is very much interested in excavating and distorting recognitions of the past. Glittering fin de siècle (and then modernist) Paris is filtered through Yeh's elongated lens; gilded-age America is attended to with a magnifying glass that zooms in on the fine details, the artifice that foregrounds experience. My favorite pieces are poems that circle through Jacobean plays, once again adding to the Late/Northern Renaissance flavor of these poems. Like the metaphysical poets before her (perhaps the clearest analog for the Mannerists), Yeh loves to play with remarkable conceits and always directs attention to the poem as a verbal and artistic form. And these poems raise an important question: what damage is done, what do we lose, when we yield ourselves to art?

In the last two lines of "Self-Portrait After Vermeer" Yeh writes "Late, playing my age, framing myself / while you steal a little here and now." Yeh's Marabou is a piece of time travel, inviting readers into the Northern Renaissance, through the Baroque period, then the Victorian. But this is deflection. While traveling, while peering through these lovely frames, Yeh caustically reminds us (always the one pulling the strings) that we lose the "here and now."

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Usually I'm not a huge fan of collections that aren't as strongly unified by some kind of theme or idea but Yeh's poetry is so exciting and unexpected that this was one of those few cases where I didn't mind. There is something interesting and intricate in the poems, even if some of them leap off the page more than others. My favourite was by far the poem about the owl cast to deliver letters to Harry Potter in the first movie, although a very close favourite were the handful of poems related to works of art. Yeh's poems made me want to sit and carefully peal them into layers and admire then individually and as a whole. They're unique and perhaps even a bit eccentric, in the nicest way possible.

[Bodies in the Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favourite poetry collections - I love its mix of the personal with the remote, and one of its poems, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites’ states directly one of the questions with which almost all the best poems are concerned in one way or another: “What *do* you mean by beauty?”

When I was studying for my PGC in Creative Writing and this collection came out, it really influenced how I put my own portfolio submissions together. I had been overly worried by advice not to have two poems with the same structure next to each other, and here was Yeh, with a whole load of free verse couplets one after the other after the other, and it didn’t detract from the impact of each poem.

Reread ahead of an online workshop she’s leading tomorrow.

Three Word Review: weird, artistic, brilliant.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

"if the day comes i shall stand before you: uncertain of voice, unsteady of feature. i shall barely remember how to signal assent with my hands, much less the words orchidaceous and belated, least of all how to account for the distance from the shimmering, fantastical concoction of my past to the thing i have become."

[Eddus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeh is an incredible talent with a unique voice and stance. You feel transformed into the characters in her poems and inhabit their humanity and inhumanity. A beautiful collection.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fav collection of poetry this year thus far.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating collection chocked full of intertexuality, intratexuality and history. I think I’d need to read it several times to fully appreciate it.

[scarlettraces · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have really liked Yeh from the time of reading her second collection. I read all sorts of poetry including lyrical and confessional, but I like the brand Yeh tends to write the most.

She explains it much better than I ever could, so here's Yeh in her own words (from her British Arts Council profile): ‘What’s important to me is trying to access the language of these characters, rather than trying to create ‘realistic’ simulacra’ .... Their language, and their situations, are much more interesting than my own. ... The theme of performance runs through a lot of the poems - the idea that we all have multiple identities, that we present different faces or fronts to the world at different times, and that we can construct new identities, at least to some extent.’

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day 2 of the Sealey Challenge 2023: For some reason this year I didn't enjoy this as much. Which is odd because I was so looking forward to rereading. I am tired from traveling though so I will try again.

Day 6 of the Sealey Challenge. I read this without knowing anything about the poet or her work and I loved it. Such an interesting range of characters and settings. Gorgeous language. Definitely recommended!