[In the following favorable review of Corpse and Mirror, Eshleman contends that Yau's poetic abilities establish him “as one of the most genuinely gifted poets of his reticently emerging generation.”]

Corpse and Mirror, selected by John Ashbery as one of the five “National Poetry Series” books this year, is John Yau's seventh collection. It is clearly the most experimental, and probably the strongest, book to appear in the series publishing five books each year, now in its fifth year.

One might begin to think about Yau's writing by summoning aspects of Confucianism, Edward Hopper and Franz Kafka. As a Chinese American, Yau draws on images from ancient China, evoking a world of omens and memories that is not “now” but not entirely “then” either. He has a way of presenting his materials, via the atmosphere of a post World War II Chinese background permeated by the lack of any real American past, that is gentle, “correct” and bizarre. Here is a poetry in which Chinese chariots must, in effect, make their way through the desolate landscape of late night Hollywood movies.

The result is a poetry frayed with loneliness; the peculiar is juxtaposed with the ordinary and even the trivial. A kind of surrealism, in which dead and living share secrets, is present—however, Yau's poetry is not surrealistic in any doctrinaire way. The surrealism is natural in the sense that it is the product of the fusion of Chinese “deportment” and the junk-filled American landscape Imagine a late-night Hopper diner scene: Yau sits alone staring at a piece of meat the wall behind him is filled with the scene from a movie showing Chinese horses being interred with an emperor; if one will do that, one will have a fair idea of this poet's sensibility.

Both Yau's poems and prose poems are built out of fractured and prismed anecdotes often no more than traces; sentences are repeated with some of their words interchanged with words from other sentences. Such repetitious predictability calls to mind sestinas and villanelles, but it is as if the rules have half-decomposed and the words or lines to be repeated in sequence have gotten lost and are wandering around becoming interested in other lost phrases until their author loses interest in their predicament and abandons the poem. On a technical level, then, the poetry is quite congruent with its psychic materials, and the “corpse and mirror” of the book's title can be understood as: material and distortion, or death and reflection. The mirror is the voice of the corpse, and the corpse is the dead we mirror.

One of the best poems in the book is the 11-stanza, or paragraph (Yau's confusion of the two is intentional) “Broken Off By The Music.” By juxtaposing the first two “stanzas” with the third and fourth, I hope to offer an example of the rearrangements I have been describing:

With the first gray light of dawn the remnants
of gas stations and supermarkets assume their
former shapes. A freckled, redheaded boy
stares into the refrigerator, its chrome shelves
lined with jars, cans, and bottles—each
appropriately labeled with a word and a picture.
For some of the other inhabitants of the yellow
apartment house the mere vapor of food
in the morning is sufficient nourishment.
Along the highway dozens of motorists have pulled
onto the shoulder of the road, no longer guided
by the flicker of countless stars dancing over
the surface of asphalt. Three radios
disagree over what lies ahead. It is morning,
and sand no longer trickles onto the austere
boulevards of the capital.

It is as if in stanzas three and four, stanzas one and two are pulled inside out, but not completely: inside out, a new shape results, which is not merely the opposite of or a variation on the original shape:

Distance can hardly lend enchantment to the remnants
of a supermarket where faces are torn, as always,
between necessity and desire. With the first gray
light of evening a freckled girl assumes her former
shape each limb appropriately labeled with words
of instruction. The younger boy skips away from
the others, while singing a song full of words
he stumbles over.
Outside the capital, two motorists disagree over
the remnants of a refrigerator. Three boys stare
at what lies behind the stars. A breeze reminds
everyone of their former shapes, while evening
lends an austere enchantment to the yellow window
of a gas station.

This sort of operation at times seems to contain the ghost of an ancient Chinese landscape scroll painting; tiny figures appear, disappear, some of whom will reappear, in the verdure and fog of a mountain that for all its grandeur seems hardly there at all. Yau's language has the specificity and vagueness that comes from looking carefully at paintings and from staying in touch with the kind of out-of-itness that it takes to see the living and the dead in the Chinese-American crowds on Canal Street in New York City today. His ability to make so many things work at once, and to create so many entrances and exits for the reader, establishes him, at 33, as one of the most genuinely gifted poets of his reticently emerging generation.