sam_bizar_wilcox's review against another edition
5.0
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."
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."
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