Jeffrey Yang

Jeffrey Yang is a translator of classical Chinese poetry and an editor at New Directions, and thus one of nature's gentlemen; his book, however, is so dense and opaque as to be virtually unreadable. His is a spare, cryptic line, dense with historicultural allusion ("the immanence / of the Sacred Table / Floral kufic, chamfered letters…"). As with all such gnomic styles, one can only hope to surf the lines and hope to receive a generalized aesthetic experience of distance, magnificence, and antiquity. The last section shifts to a poetical history of the (imagined?) North American settlement of Yennecott and its violent colonial past, becoming in the process perhaps a shade more penetrable, with its "firsthand filtered memories" of "the unfound buried."… (meer)