Jeffery Yang's epic

I'm still trying to get a handle on Jeffery Yang's work. Vanishing-Line, new from Graywolf, took me by surprise after I finished Aquarium. The narrator's vision in Aquarium had a fairly steady focal range and a consistent format; you looked sequentially at an alphabetized list of creatures through a set of binoculars or microscope set up and handed to you by the narrator. They are all about the same distance away, and you get about the same amount of time to watch each one. Then, on to the next exhibit. Your ecological tour guide does make comments that assess and contextualize the images, but rarely strays from the format, describing each creature from "Abalone" to "Zooxanthellae." Here are the representative opening lines of "Anemone": "Anemones are warriors, colonizing / rock and reef in ranks. The history/ of the world is told thru the eye / of the colonizer, who takes pleasure in / sticking his fingers into an anemone's / mouth until it starves." You see the sea creature and then hear remarks that transfer metaphorically that image to the stage of history. (In other poems, the image transfers to the philosophy or religion or politics.)

But Vanishing-Line follows both a radically different form and works at a different scale. This is a geographic and wide-lens historical view. I think of slow pan in the opening of vistas of There Will Be Blood. The first and last words of the book are "place": the first poem is called "place" and the book closes with a quotation from Robert Duncan on place. In each place he presents, Yang positions "facts." These facts -- about his Chinese grandmother and her context or about the dark history of Native Americans on this continent's east coast-- function as artifacts in an epic reenactment.

These facts form the focus and the medium of the poet, as they so self-consciously did for the Objectivists and Imagists. The echoes and interplays between Yang's work at George Oppen's Of Being Numerous are well, numerous. (Yang mentions Oppen in this book's bibliographic note and in a poem in Aquarium, assuring me that I do not image the influence.) Although the author speaks mostly in the third-person omniscient, he occasionally allows an "I" to appear intimately integrated into the large-scale landscape. In Oppen, that landscape is New York; in Yang, it is the east coast surrounding that city.

I call these poems "epics" because of this scale, and perhaps the most fascinating moments are when an "I" does step into the poem or when the poem shifts from microscopic detail to macroscopic reflection. For example, in one line zooming from the size of a nail in a canoe to the scope of a dynastic nation: "Canoes without nails, scoops for oars // They walked // as Portugal lost its monopoly..."

Lots more to think about and a few more reads before I can articulate clearly what he's up to in this complex book that I highly recommend.