dublinka

Today I picked up Teen Spies, a collection of poems from Jane Yeh, published by Meter Editions back in 2003. It has a number of interesting poems, which are mostly studies of one kind or another, including; Ook the Owl, a quirky Harry Potter inspired, critique of show business, through the narration of an Owl: ‘sadly I owe my success to typecasting’; Blue China: “In the Great Fire / Of 1666, glazing reversed itself and ran down the window-panes / Until every piece of bottle-bottomed glass / Fell out: a dripping Restoration.; and Teen Spies itself: “We kill time waiting for our lives to start”. Pride of place, however goes to Adultery, with its unforgettable finale: “Even if the phone rings now I won’t stop”.

In Pistol Opera the quirky Seijun Suzuki movie on Japanese assassins, the rules of murder are governed by aesthetics, and Yeong-he Han, plays the little girl Sayoko, who is soon to be unmasked as an assassin herself - and ultimately beheaded. On one level, her significance in the movie, is to act as an all seeing eye, through which the movie can unfold. On another, she gives expression to some of the most intriguing moments in the film, where she is simultaneously an independent character, and an echo of the origins of lead character Stray Cat, played by Makiko Esumi. In the process we see her abandoning the reading of poetry (Wordsworth's Daffodils) in favour of learning, or pretending to want to be the killer, she already is. In another scene she performs a strange and disturbing recitation of Humpty Dumpty, half childs play, half torn and stringless marionette dance. It's all odd, trashy and endearing.

It's kind of appropriate to observe the man's departure, not with my words, but with his own. The following lines are from Requiem, which can be found in his 2005 collection of essays, A Man Without A Country.

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

"It is done."

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