From Library Journal
Like John Ashbery's, the avant-garde poetry of art critic Yau comprises a meditation on contemporary urban realities: "fragments suspended/ inside glistening velocities/ their clusters of sounds rippling/ toward the capital of tongues." In obscure notebooks, postcards, and pieces (evoked by the visionary poet Georg Trakl), Yau portrays people at once normal and absurd in images whose meaning is both explicit and cryptic. Like abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky, Yau's word assemblages utilize a dissolving geometry of antinarrative, nondiscursive associations. In this modernistic land of "radiant wreckage," fulfillment and self-renewal are problematical, and the poet, looking for "evidence of communication" or sexual encounters on "Happy Avenue," finally arrives at an elusive "Edificio Sayonara": "In a few months or years he would learn the meaning of its song." Analyzing difficulties of how one perceives others and one's self in a fragmented, discontinuous world, these cosmopolitan apparitions are as compelling as they are puzzling.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., InstituteCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
poetry, incl "Genghis Chan: Private Eye"
