Squawking Heads

Marabou, as its nonce-like title might suggest, is something of a curiosity, its strangely seductive array of intricacies and bafflements often collapsing originality into idiosyncrasy. The impersonality of its favourite form, the dramatic monologue – steeped in half-allusions to Browning's duchess, to Eliot's or Prufrock's mermaids (possibly also to 'Gerontion', whose dislocation of language into meaning seems not a world away) and to Plath's 'Lady Lazarus' – counts among the many red herrings, the distractions of a drama never quite made flesh, an ontology never entirely sure of itself, or its not-self. A case, perhaps, for one of the 'Teen Spies', who write 'log notes' in order to 'kill time waiting for our lives to start', code words and codology only ceding to post-adolescent angst with the final assertion of an 'I':

                                        Saw a demented corgi pissOn someone's shoe. Shadowed DF backTo his flat. Observed a parrot satOn someone's head. I am past                                             seventeen and have never been kissed.

Yeh's own 'Notes' at the end of the volume further intimate a hermeneutic hollowness, a private language of poetry no more to be decoded than the teen spies' 'own lingo', helpfully informing us, for instance, that the poem 'Monster' 'bears no relation to the film of that title'.

In fact, though Yeh's application of the word bears no guaranteed relation to the dictionary's, 'marabou', 'a tuft or plume of the soft white downy feathers from the wings or tail of the marabou stork, used for trimming hats, etc.' (OED), marries two of her major motifs, which are more like obsessions: animals and clothes. Parliamentarian fowls, Cumbrian sheep, the demented corgi, a blindfolded cat, are among the menagerist's cast, but the star of the show is undoubtedly Ook the Owl, cast to play Harry Potter's Owl. Poetry is awash with talking birds, from Chauntecleer (of the Nun's Priest's Tale) to Poe's Raven, but none as neurotic as Ook. With all the cutting edge of a Channel 5 documentary the poem takes us behind the scenes, enabling us to get to know the real Ook, the bird behind 'the Snowy White Owl Who Delivers Mail for Harry' in the first film of the franchise: a sensitive soul, dedicated to his craft ('Between takes, I did leg-lifts in my trailer'), who nevertheless feels uncomfortable under the glare of the camera and in the company of the glitterati, finding the lot of the screen owl, well, dehumanising. Allowing 'fake friends to pet me', our feathered friend puts a brave face on it, or would do had he 'the capacity for more facial expression'; yet one wonders what goes through his mind when he's tucked up at night, or during the day, with his cuddly toy Mr Sheep – and, indeed, what goes through Mr Sheep's mind. This kind of surreal comedy is Yeh's forte, and I doubt whether anyone has ever wrung so much amusement out of the word 'chickens' as Yeh does in another poem merely through the awkwardness of its tripleted repetition. But tragedy is also a presence in her work, as 'Revenger's Tragedy' attests, the murderous beauty of its couplets revealing a capacity for facial expression within the internal drama:

                                        I bide time, Hoarse-tongued and blue as poison, the double

Line of my eyes gone to slits. I hate like a tooth hurts, At the root. I will startle the bones

From their sockets, they will crack like glass And catch in your throat. I will dazzle

Your heart from its cage. The lungs will knock and clap Together in the empty place. The applause will make you rattle.

The creative tension between text and performance is made explicit in 'Bad Quarto', where the book's self-confessed deficiencies become a source of filmic potential: 'I'm shot | Full of holes and jump cuts'. If the procedure here more nearly resembles What's My Line than dramatic monologue – elsewhere it is likened to 'a game of charades...