Tell It Slant

A number of the poems in Tell It Slant are pantoums, which is convenient, since so many of John Yau’s lines are too good to read just once. I find myself savoring the ones that take the form of questions: “Do you skip like this because you have been invited into our lovely little choir?” “When did you start storing expired cans of insect repellent under the sink.”  “What if his world is my heaven and my world is his heaven?” (all emphases mine)

Yau shows himself indefatigable in his readiness to pull at the sticky fibers of language and reality. His poetic propositions are beguiling, as in the opening poem “Too Far to Write Down”:

I followed you until I realized it was not you I was following
I don’t love the blossoms enough that I want to catch them when they fall
In the distance a house sits beneath an approaching meteor of paint

His prose, by contrast, is more intimate, modest, devastating—with that cosmopolitan Fitzcarraldoian polish:

It was this series of orbits, which got me to meet Nicola, who is central to the story, though I don’t believe the event I am referring to happened during this first visit. It was during another visit that he took me to a bar […] I know this didn’t happen when we first met because the weather was warm and there was no snow on the ground.

The word “never” tolls through this book with a septuagenarian’s surety. This speaker is even confident about what he does not know (“I’m never sure how I got into doing the circle paintings”). I say “speaker” because, though this and other utterances are lifted wholesale (here, from an interview with painter Robert Mangold), the effect is not one of bricolage but a seamless whole, thanks to Yau’s unerring ear and eye.