JANE YEH
Marabou
Carcanet £6.95

HELEN FARISH
Intimates
Cape £9.00

JOHN WESTON
Chasing the Hoopoe
Peterloo Poets £7.95

Jane Yeh is a young American poet, currently living in England. ‘I have my ways’, she writes in the opening poem of Marabou, ‘of keeping time’. She certainly has. Every poem in this impressive first collection is an intelligent firework, taking off energetically to pursue an unexpected and satisfactory path — satisfactory to the reader, that is to say, if often strenuous for the writer.

She has the gift that marks the true poet: simple words and sentences crackle into life the moment she touches them, and though the situations she describes are often complex and sometimes unhappy, her language is the sovereign mistress of all it surveys. Nothing gets it down: ‘...Last year you called me / Your little sunflower. Eleven blizzards later I think of how /
To get you...’ (‘Revenger’s Tragedy’)

Her account of ‘Adultery’, written in the persona of the adulteress, is comic, painful and precise. ‘I’ve an eye to the main chance’, the speaker tells us defiantly, and we can see she wants to believe it — but she can’t quite suppress her awareness of what is happening on more consequential levels:

               if this heart, it clatters

Into the bin like a handful of loose change, if this tatty
Muzzle, it fits the crime, if strapless

Were to ‘having it’ as bang-up is to ‘done that’,
Would my position be worth a flutter?

Later she goes on: ‘love / Is blind they say, but I’m having none of it.’ The speaker is bragging and attempting to talk tough, but her words and perceptions betray her at every step.

But this is in no way confessional poetry (or if it is, Yeh gives no guidance as to which bits are autobiographical). Her poems are the product of a great deal of artifice, and highly imaginative. With equal conviction but in a very different style, she writes in the persona of two European princesses, who are marrying the Kings of Spain and France respectively in ‘Double Wedding, 1615’:

             We are wired

For great things and small movements, hooped
To glide like gigantic orchids, full-

Blown, slow-footed and deliberate
In error.

Such writing has a classical perfection, witty because of its precision, emotionally as held-in as the princesses themselves. With less obvous elegance, but with equal control and mastered exuberance, she writes as a ‘Bad Quarto’:

               when I’m caught in your ratchets

Inexorable, turning, stretched across a table, stripped
To the core with all my spindly shanks showing, if then I’m

Off-spindle, missish, lo-fi and hissy,
Tangled, denatured, petty, a crosspatch —

It’s because you can expose me.

There are few limits to Yeh’s powers of impersonation. In other poems she is Ook the Owl (cast to play an owl in the first Harry Potter film), Oscar Wilde, the sheep culled in Cumbria in the foot-and-mouth outbreak, a group of Chinese students sent by Mao Tse-tung to Paris to cure them of their cultural limitations. Improbable as all these may sound, her poise and inventiveness allow her to encompass them movingly and informatively.

Her range is Jacobean; comedy, tragedy and extravagance are all within reach; she is highly educated, doesn’t pretend otherwise, but she remains entirely unforbidding. It is a pleasure to read such brilliant, vigorous writing and I recommend it most warmly.

With Helen Farish we are in a very different world. As her title suggests, she writes a poetry nakedly close to feeling. Intimates consists of nearly fifty short poems, telling a loosely structured story of a loveaffair that goes wrong, entangled in some way with the protagonist’s feelings about her father, and then the aftermath. In the first poem, entitled ‘Look at These’, the speaker wants to lift her top to show her lover her breasts — ‘Don’t tell me not to’. Other early poems such as ‘Blindcrake’ continue this theme of blissful sexual eagerness — ‘as with everything / meant to be, it was all / by chance, driving too far / through Redmain, no place / for a U-turn’. There is an excited sense of warnings being ignored, the pleasures of ecstasy being consciously preferred to boring old common sense. The man or men are invisible, though we are shown a motor-bike, a leather jacket, a red MG driving into the farmyard.

These fizzy emotions might just be everybody’s adolescence, but we glimpse something more worrying in ‘What Held Us There’, when she describes stopping to listen to a group of open-air folk-dancers and their band. ‘I would have said it was spring, that feeling, / but the summer was well through, almost / looking back on itself.’ Perhaps we are not in adolescence after all. And ‘Brathay’, an ecstatic poem about a walk in the country — ‘a capital J for summer / (joy) and a D for don’t / (let this end)’ — arrives at a final line, ‘The Dazzle of this World’, which may (but I’m not quite sure) indicate reaching some reflective distance on what has so bubblily preceded it.

I was reminded, as I read these excited opening poems, of Schubert’s song-cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin, which also begins with a touching impetuosity of emotion, clearly headed for a nasty shock when it meets the real complexity of human relationship. And so it proves. We move to poems of satirical anger at betrayal (‘Mount Mirtagh and Back’) and great sadness at loss (‘Empire State Building’, ‘The Ring’s Story’, ‘The Cheapest Flowers’), followed then by poems of loneliness and emptiness. The speaker’s ‘intimates’ now are described as disarray and fear (‘The Sea Speaks’). In a nice image, she speaks to the lighthouse of Nauset, which has been removed to a field. She wonders, does it miss the tides? The lighthouse replies that it no longer wishes for

           the longing
light lays on water.

Now I want boundaries:
a hedge, plums, more than enough.

Perhaps to extract the emotional narrative in this way is to do these poems an injustice. Certainly they can be read and enjoyed as individual pieces. They are very well written in the spare, accurate free verse that is now widespread. Their imagery is moving and original, very economically conveyed, and they stay very truthful to immediate feeling. One can well understand why Farish was awarded the Forward Prize for ‘best first collection’ in 2005. But — I am left with a but, which is hard to put into words. Feeling is excellent, and essential, but for a poem to pass the second test — to be not only worth reading but worth re-reading — something more is required: some irony, some artifice, some wisdom, some layering. One wants to feel that the simplicity of the protagonist is not, or is no longer, the simplicity of the poet. I was left uncertain. It will be very interesting to see where Farish takes her poetry next.

In John Weston’s poems, language is used in yet another entirely different register. Not a professional writer but an energetic diplomat with a successful and distinguished career, he began writing poetry after retiring in 1998 (he was by then British Ambassador to the UN). Weston’s poetry is generous and capacious: his poems are full of things, places, people, activity. He writes in a wide range of forms, including some very competent sapphics and alcaics. On one occasion he attempts a ‘concrete’ — typographical — poem, and another piece is addressed to Ian Hamilton Finlay — reminding one of the range of playful and experimental possibilities that have been almost forgotten in the earnest world of the early 21st century. Significantly, his collection is about double the length of each of the others.

Taking up poetry in his sixties has clearly been for Weston part of meditating on the course of his life, and reminding himself of his childhood and family background. (His father, it seems, also wrote poetry, though unpublished.) The first section of this book contains poems looking back to his parents and to family life, and I liked especially the four-page tribute to his wife, ‘Fifty Years On’. They met first and were drawn to each other as school-children:

We both know now it was love at first sight
but for thirteen years I reckoned like a Ptolemy
before it dawned my orbit centred on you.

The second section is of nature poems, with themes drawn from his wide travels. The book’s curious title, Chasing the Hoopoe, finds its explanation here. Weston captures nicely the excitement of meeting this unexpected bird on the Scillies (last seen ‘on a consular lawn / in Jerusalem’) — ‘Halloo small miracle’, he says to it. Perhaps the hoopoe is an example and emblem of the fascinating particulars of life to which all his poetry pays such delighted homage. A rather Kipling-esque ‘Song of Praise’ to the leaf-cutter ant is a little awkwardly written, but it’s very enjoyable and conveys a great deal of information along with, again, his love of the astonishing particulars of the actual, observable world. In another poem, ‘Waking Dream’, he scores to my knowledge the first poetic mention of the rose-ringed parakeets in Richmond Park.

In his third section he reflects more specifically as the retired mandarin he is. An ex Ambassador, he isn’t going to slag off the Government too stridently; his comment on the Iraq war is judicious and conveys a sense of the serious values to which good diplomats aspire. It ends:

But tell our children we’re a lesser country
when common sense is ruled by moral fervour.

Perhaps, though, the limitations of a lifetime in the diplomatic service are also visible here. To be mild but accurate in rebuke is admirable, and often a sign of maturity, but to take a country to war on a platform of lies is not accurately described by the phrase ‘moral fervour’.

A translation of Catullus is lively and enjoyable. And in the final section, devoted to China where he was posted for many years, Weston’s translations of poems by Mao Tse-tung are interesting, and disconcerting to one’s assumption (mine at any rate) that Mao was uniformly unfeeling and repellent. I found especially moving in this section, however, a poem called ‘Peking Rap’, describing the siege and burning of the British Diplomatic Mission in 1967. (Weston and his wife were among those trapped when the mob broke in and the fire started — his wife was physically assaulted). He describes this terrifying ordeal vividly, but calls it small beer compared with what was suffered by the millions who starved to death in the Great Leap Forward. His diplomacy only just deserts him in his final comment:

I bow to China and her beauty,
and hold no grudge, just this conclusion:
let Mao be judged by history,
and f___ all bloody revolution!

Overall, this is an unusual collection to be reviewed in the pages of Poetry London. Its robust and generous quality is refreshing and enlarging.

DM Black’s Collected Poems 1964-87 was published by Polygon in 1991, and his translations of Goethe have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London and other journals. His website is www.dmblack.me.uk

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