An Aquarium Poems

From "Abalone" to "Zooxanthellae," Jeffrey Yang's debut poetry collection is full of the exhilarating colors and ominous forms of aquatic life. But deeper under the surface are his observations on war, environmental degradation, language, and history, as a fathertroubled by violence and human mismanagement of the worldoffers advice to a newborn son. Jeffrey Yangis a poet, translator, and editor at New Directions Publishing Corp. He is the translator ofEast Slopeby Su Shi, and his poetry has appeared inThe Nation,Tin House,and elsewhere. He lives in Beacon, New York. From "Abalone" to "Zooxanthellae," Jeffrey Yang's debut poetry collection is full of the exhilarating colors and ominous forms of aquatic life. But deeper under the surface are his observations on war, environmental degradation, language, and history, as a fathertroubled by violence and human mismanagement of the worldoffers advice to a newborn son. "Here is a first book written from a very high floor of the Tower of Babel, and the view is exhilarating. Not since D. H. Lawrence'sBirds, Beasts and Flowers!or the bestiary written by Kenneth Rexroth for his daughters has a poet wrung so much human meaning from the natural world. But whereas Lawrence is discursively tender, and Rexroth wry and epigrammatically clever, Jeffrey Yang speaks in tongues as if touched with a Pentecostal flame. He leads the reader through a net of allusions in poems barnacled with hard words. A typical Yang poem begins with the title 'Oarfish'; traces it to the abode of humans called Midgard in Norse myth; invokes the ourobouros, the serpent devouring its own tail in a symbol of infinity; quotes the 19th-century American artist Elihu Vedder, the Baroque religious scholar Sor Juana and Lawrence's poem 'Fish'; glances at the Homeric word 'oarismos' (roughly, 'pillow talk'); and ends with guanine, a chemical that codes genetic information and also a substance found in fish scales . . . Compounding his ingenuities, Yang has also arranged the poems in this book as an abecedary, proceeding from A ('Abalone') through to Z ('Zooxanthellae'). What might feel like a gimmick instead leaves the reader dazzled at Yang's polymathic knowledge: dazzled, but not threatened, since the advent of Google means that allusiveness in poetry is no longer the challenge it used to be. In any case, as one ancient master tell us, 'What people / know is inferior to what they do not know.' Yang writes with a keen ear for the sound of language; indeed, his poems' openings sometimes seem like verbal spasms, before they smooth into grammar: 'Abalone Rumsenaulon/ Aristotle auriform Costanoans / cultivated, Brueghel painted, / awabi Osahi dove for / on September 12, 435 A.D.' Subject, verb, and object resolve only gradually out of such music. These poems are concerned with translation and with metaphor, both of which involve a 'carrying across' from the natural into the human world; from the past into the present; from one language or civilization into another. Often they use the mousetrap form of the epigram, sudden and pleasing: 'The barnacle has the longest penis / of any animal in proportion; / never be ashamed of evolution.' Modesty figures among the lessons to be learned from nature, too; and honesty; and patience. And the poetic vehicle for these lessons is capable of great delicacy. A poem describing a kind of tetra, the familiar aquarium fish, reads in its entirety: 'You can see straight thru / an X-ray fish to its heart. / We are just as transparent / so be true, gentle, honest, just . . .' Accordingly, politicians are at one end of the moral spectrum for Yang, and our genetic near-neighbors the dolphin and the manatee are at the other. For in addition to its other strengthsso considerabl

Jeffrey Yang is a poet, translator, and editor at New Directions Publishing Corp. He is the translator of East Slope by Su Shi, and his poetry has appeared in The Nation, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Beacon, New York.