The poems in this book are fairly difficult, allusive, language-driven, nonnarrative works that try to create an idea or feeling or image in your mind from a rich world of words, juxtapositions and snippets of history. Yang is something of a pointillist--he uses words as small dots and dashes, pure color, applied to form a pattern that gradually reveals something to the reader: "wynde-hidden words/ there the island, there the sea/ / floating island mass of the mind/ vanishing beyond the vanishing-line." At times his language play harkens back to Gerard Manley Hopkins: "shield sheds shard/ green-glazed, lost whole."
Yang's first collection of poetry, An Aquarium, was very well received. His position as poetry editor at New Directions and his work as a translator certainly help him in his quest for new and original ways to create poetry. This collection pushes his technique further. Here are a mere seven poems, largely about history and language itself. The final poem, some 50 pages long, deals with the poet walking around a village on eastern Long Island named Yennecott by the Native Americans. The poem has some beautiful, descriptive passages, but it also has grisly descriptions amid a searing indictment of the Europeans' terrible mistreatment of the Indians. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher