Helena Nelson reviews Exposure by Eric Yip (Ignition Press, 2024)
I believe Eric Yip has thought hard about straight lines. I’ve always been a straight-line-noticer myself. When I was about ten, I once spent some hours stretching and tying strands of wool across my bedroom – for example from the door knob to the bed head; from the window to the wardrobe door. I made a sort of grid, under which you could crawl unimpeded but not stand up, except inside a straight-sided ‘cell’. In the end, the room resembled a gigantic spider’s web (the spider being another of nature’s straight-line-makers). I found the pattern exciting but I’d no idea why (making the bed would have been impossible). I don’t think I’ve told anyone about this before, it seemed too odd.
But when I read Eric Yip’s poem ‘[First they began cutting the world]’ (a first-line title), I remembered the experience and felt I wasn’t alone. The opening words (“First they began cutting”) signal the beginning of a story. To start with, ‘they’ begin cutting the world into “right angles”, which makes a “grid”, which in turn causes “a distrust” of “non-rectangular” objects. What happens next? ‘They’ go on to cut (out) everything that isn’t straight. ‘Their’ slogans read “No Corners No Purpose”. Naturally, there are casualties, including (this poem has a sense of humour) umbrellas, water bottles and rings; laundromat owners are also in trouble. It reminded me of James Thurber’s story The Wonderful O, where the letter ‘o’ is banished from the alphabet and Ophelia Oliver is never seen again. Here “all round objects” are trimmed until “a state of order” is “restored” (note the recurring, curvy, letter O). By the last line, nothing curved is left “but the eye” itself, with its circular pupil and iris, its eyebrow arches.
The idea here fascinated me. After all, why are we so driven to create things in squares and oblongs? Why is the built environment made of lines and rectangles, though nature’s lines are curvy? But I found the form of the poem puzzling. It doesn’t have a standard shape. Its lines follow an irregular pattern of indents with varying gaps between words and phrases. Some lines are short. Others stretch almost from margin to margin, albeit incorporating spaces. No regular pattern. No punctuation. So what’s the purpose of all this? – because it certainly disrupts reading. I typed the text out for myself, removed all the spaces and replaced punctuation, breaking each line on a logical pause. I uncovered an oblong poem of 17 lines, comprising three sentences. It was easier to follow now; easier to pick up interesting sound patterns too. However, my conventional format (which I suspect might be where the poem started) had corners. I think the whole point may have been to have no corners. Besides, the official poem allowed the last two lines to read:
there was nothing left to carve
but the eye
Much more dramatic than my sober, straightforward rendering! Besides, that “eye” is a central image in this debut collection. The poet explores ways of seeing throughout the pamphlet, frequently alluding to light, photography and cinema. Perhaps that’s another reason why his layouts vary so much, although this is not unusual in contemporary work. It’s almost as though the new norm is first to write your poem (perhaps in compressed prose) and then consider what shape to ‘carve’ it into. We see some strikingly elaborate artefacts, impossible for a screen-reader to negotiate effectively, and therefore a nightmare for the visually impaired reader.
It’s almost as though the new norm is first to write your poem (perhaps in compressed prose) and then consider what shape to ‘carve’ it into
This is not to say such formats aren’t interesting. ‘Not To Be Any Trouble’, for example, is (according to the notes) “a variant on the burning haibun“, a form devised by torrin a. greathouse. I knew what a haibun was, but not the burning kind. I found myself looking at a page of greyed-out (but legible) print, with a handful of individual characters picked out in black, a sort of erasure. It took a while to decipher the black text but with a little persistence, I scribbled under the poem: “leaves in a teacup / dead birds in a pond”. Aha! The haiku of the haibun, buried in the prose text rather than positioned after it. The pale grey text (a note tells us) is drawn from five different sources: de Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, two articles from the South China Morning Post, one from The Telegraph and one from The Economist. With the exception of the de Quincey, all these discuss the recent increase in immigration from Hong Kong to the UK (thanks to political fear and the Hong Kong Welcome Programme). Yip is a Hong Kong poet; obviously this is close to his heart. What’s his message? Something ironic, I guess, about UK motives. Why would the UK welcome immigrants? Because they won’t “be any trouble”? Perhaps this oh-so-hard-to-read poetic form is deliberately making trouble. And why not?
There are only twenty poems here, most of them short, but all the same, there’s a lot of reading. I went slowly, looked up all the references (many of which were new to me) and did plenty of thinking. I was astonished to find I still hadn’t finished after three days. I was reading as a reviewer, of course, which is a particular kind of commitment. I don’t mind poetry that makes me work, and it did. I quickly grew convinced that everything was part of a plan, and that the author had done nothing lightly. All the same, poetry readers, in the end, are selfish. When we read, we think (even if we don’t articulate it) ‘what’s in this for me?’
What would I go back to? What would I copy out and keep? It wouldn’t be the ones with tricky formats – not even the longest, ‘Doppelgänger’, the first page of which reminds me (in its format) of a face with a beard, though that might be fortuitous. It wouldn’t be the tricky repetitions of ‘Hearsay’ either, though I won’t forget it; nor ‘Zuihitsu Ending With a Line by Zhao Yi’, despite the fabulous line “Like a magician’s assistant, a book prepares for its own vanishing.” It wouldn’t even be the cliff-like parallel lines of ‘Ardently Love’, though I think it’s a strong opener. For me, a handful of first-person pieces with emotive pay-offs are most satisfying. There’s ‘Tear’, for example, which exposes the poet’s father as a broken man; ‘Subject’, where the poet reluctantly identifies with a young man in a film; and ‘Tenor’, an unassuming love poem. None of these three is visually unusual, but all are potently affecting. ‘Fricatives’ also belongs in that set, though it has a ‘you’ rather than an ‘I’ viewpoint and lands a heavy-weight punch; it won the National in 2021 and, as a result, was already familiar to me. Its layout is conventional (a left-justified block), and its complex soundscape is rich. One could even argue that the sound is more important than the shape. These four poems, despite their un-experimental appearances, strike me as markedly original.
What would I go back to? What would I copy out and keep? It wouldn’t be the ones with tricky formats …
‘Tenor’, for example, is the concluding poem, a deceptively quiet exit. Only 15 lines long, it has a sonnet-ish feeling to it. It reminds me of the late Andrew Waterhouse’s ‘Looking for the Comet’, which I hope Yip might one day read; I suspect he won’t have (I can’t find it on the web). Here’s Waterhouse’s opening octet:
You push back the sheet, leave me
naked and cooling in the night air.
You stand by the window,
by the yellow flowers in the blue vase
and there’s moon on your face and shoulders.
‘It’s here,’ you say, but I’m pretending sleep,
and just watch you, watching the comet
moving off towards the sun and beyond.
You might notice the plainness of expression. Perhaps it wouldn’t occur to you that although there are adjectives, Waterhouse uses neither similes nor metaphors (unless you count the compression of moonlight into moon). In the ensuing sestet, which I haven’t quoted, there’s no figurative language either. And yet the whole poem is unusually moving. It has stayed with me these twenty years or more. I think Eric Yip’s ‘Tenor’ might have similar durability. It opens:
Now that I feel love, all metaphors
have turned duplicitous. We lay
down in the meadow to read.
Grass crammed into our necks.
There were no buildings, only words
or sequences of words I could use
to describe my feelings for you but
chose to reveal piecemeal so as to
remain mysterious.
That odd title (‘Tenor’) is techie-poetry-speak. In figurative language, the ‘tenor’ is the thing being described. The ‘vehicle’ is the idea / image used to describe it. (These terms have always been problematic for a literalist like me, who can’t help seeing Pavarotti climbing into a Fiat 500.) But in ‘Tenor’, there are no vehicles (no metaphors). “[The] goal is not to demonstrate, but to describe”, as observed earlier in ‘Zuihitsu Ending With a Line by ZhaoYi’. Oh but … language is complicated. Yip’s delicious word “duplicitous” is almost metaphorical, isn’t it? At least, it’s slithery, human, deceitful. He tries again. “We lay / down in the meadow to read.” Not one metaphor. And yet just as those metaphors “turned” (as in turned against or turned on us), now the line turns trickily (a visual pun) after “We lay”. The poet presses on, asserting his resistance to poetic showmanship: “Grass crammed into our necks.” This is how it was that day: grass crammed (not even one adjective). And then just a series of carefully plain lines, every one enjambed, until the close. All the same, this poet, who doesn’t usually call on rhyme, finds himself with “reveal / piecemeal”, and an inevitable echo between “duplicitous” and “mysterious”. Metaphor, moreover, is doing its best to get back in. When the loved one goes on to place “[his] calves over mine”, the speaker is “reminded […] of grass cut / exceedingly finely”. Wasn’t that – a sort of simile? The closing three and a half lines are masterful. (I’m not going to quote them. Please search them out and read them.) If this small poem represents a fight against metaphor with true feeling as the prize, the poet is victor. Hands down.
I can’t help feeling this is a poet who’s still concealing a lot, or at least deliberately holding back, and that some of his formatting tactics may be connected with that
The collection title, exposure, obviously connects with the idea of film and photography, as well as nervousness about personal intimacy. Still I can’t help feeling this is a poet who’s still concealing a lot, or at least deliberately holding back, and that some of his formatting tactics may be connected with that. He draws on personal material, but he’s concerned about over-exposure. His default is formal, perhaps slightly self-conscious: he uses ‘cannot’ instead of ‘can’t’, and ‘I do not’ instead of ‘I don’t’. I suspect this is a (possibly unconscious) protective mask. He might yet relax a little, give a little more of himself. Nevertheless, things are risky for emerging poets. Who would envy a debut in the 2020s, when innovation is the name of the game and the hounds of competition are snapping at one’s heels? Nobody wants to look … ordinary. To stand out from the crowd, new writers must surprise us. A haibun requires, at the very least, to be immolated. But readers now, as ever, crave authenticity. They want a poet who can say something personal, and mean it – as Eric Yip does at the end of ‘Star Ferry Pier’: “There is somewhere / I need to go and I cannot get there with language.” Who could not relate to that?
Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, and publisher, founding editor of HappenStance Press and Sphinx Review, and Consulting Editor at The Friday Poem. Her first collection, Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003), was a Jerwood / Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot (Shoestring, 2010). She also writes and publishes light verse, including Down With Poetry! (HappenStance, 2016) and Branded (Red Squirrel, 2019). Her most recent collection is PEARLS: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (HappenStance, 2022).
