Marabou

Current favorite line: "Our mission? That's undercover for now."

I'm just discovering Jane Yeh after years of knowing about her but not really thinking I'd like her. This book is ten years old now and I came to it via The Ninjas, her most recent collection, which I'm sure will remain a favourite of mine for a very long time.Unlike a lot of contemporary poetry collections there is nothing easy about Jane Yeh's work. Accessible in terms of its modern sensibilities, her work can simultaneously feel dense and impenetrable. Marabou is the more difficult of the two volumes - although only slightly - and there are many poems that completely locked me out at first reading, but by so doing made me more determined to get under their skin. Each is a kind of narrative snap-shot, full of minute detail and peculiar incident, and often disorientating in terms of location, period and wider context. Sometimes the title gives a clue, and sometimes there is an accompanying note, but generally you have to read and re-read her words to get closer to what might be going on. The weave of her language, always playful and boldly inventive, creates hard packed nests of image and phrase. You can take any couple of lines at random and find these things: effort is always rewarded.Maybe ten years ago I was a lazy reader and wanted verse to go straight to my head, to coax me with its fabric of documentary truth, and that's how I came to miss out on Jane Yeh. But now her poems wake me up at night and cause me to daydream at work. I'm sure I'll get over it, but it's taking longer than usual and I see that as a good thing.