Poetry review – exposure: Nick Cooke is impressed by this debut chapbook from Eric Yip
exposure
Eric Yip
ignition press
ISBN 978-1-7394543-1-9
pp 23 £6
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Eric Yip burst onto the UK scene through his stunning victory in the 2021 National Poetry Competition, at which point he was a Cambridge undergraduate of just 19, with ‘Fricatives’, described by judge Rachel Long as ‘a rubber raft’ attempting to make its way through the murky and treacherous waters of language, race, migration, and of being heard’. In the author’s own words the poem picks up on what Henri Cole once said, that the lyric poem presents ‘an X-ray of the self in a moment of being’. ‘Even if I didn’t know it at the time,’ Yip commented in a 2023 interview, ‘this X-ray was what I was attempting to capture: the guilt, homesickness, and irreverent thrill that melded together into an inseparable mass of emotion during my first months in the UK.’ That concept of imaging has continued to be a central one for Yip, as this extraordinarily mature and assured first pamphlet makes clear.
The 20-poem collection’s title is effective because its one word combines vulnerability (what or who is exposed) with the possible agents of that state (photographs, primarily, but also other artistic forms such as film, art and literature). This is the dichotomy that Sarah Howe – the T.S. Eliot-prize-winning poet whom Yip credits with making him realise he could write about Hong Kong – is in part pointing up when she notes, ‘Eric Yip is possessed of a humanely tender eye, drawn to and haunted by the moments of vulnerability that reveal us, stripped back, in our truest contours.’ There’s an unspoken contradiction here: the eye’s tenderness is actually questioned, even challenged, by its parallel propensity for stripping, as is crystallised in a particularly memorable later line, the final one of “[First they began cutting the world]”:
until detritus bloated the landfills
until a state of order was restored until
there was nothing left to carve
but the eye
The elliptical syntax allows the eye to be both the carved and the carver, the stripper-away and the revealed, the controller and the controlled. Additionally, in terms of extra layering, the enormous capacity for punning which Yip has indicated is rife in Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) might lead us to suspect, if we allow the poet might quite reasonably have transferred such playfulness to his writing in English, that ‘eye’ can also be heard as ‘I’.
The pamphlet’s opening salvo, “Ardently Love”, focusses on American photographer and AIDS-awareness activist Paul Wojnarowicz, specifically his iconic (Untitled) Buffaloes, with its four buffaloes seen in various stages of falling off a cliff. Having touched on the plight and perspective of all four doomed animals, Yip gives us an arrestingly new viewpoint, that of the cliff:
The cliff does not understand the gravity of the situation.
The photo is angry at the cliff for its ignorance and sad
at the buffaloes for dying. It has embalmed its sadness
for the viewer to imagine.
The link with gay men and AIDS, already set up through a sub-titular Mandarin allusion glossed as ‘lit. AIDS guy (neologism, colloquial, derogatory) a gay man’ is brought to the fore at the poem’s end. In a sudden flashback, Yip regresses to an adolescent period, suggesting an unworldly innocence that’s actually belied both by the poem hitherto, and his precociously shrewd coming-of-age-style conclusion, as he considers the metaphorical significance of the animals’ helpless, unforeseen plunge towards destruction:
I examine the photo without
having seen a buffalo or lost anyone to AIDS.
I am sixteen realising why they call us what they call us.
The story needs the cliff as much as it needs the buffaloes.
In other words, there can be no persecution without the persecutors. A similar theme is invoked by another take on teenage perception, through the rampant bullying and sexual violence portrayed in the film All About Lily Chou-Chou. That poem, “Broadway Cinematique”, memorably ends with a different angle on the pamphlet’s essential paradox. Yip posits someone apparently in control – a cinema-goer entering the auditorium, of their own free will – being suddenly exposed to (and by) the emotional content of the film they’ve come to see:
Someday you might walk in and find a story
already holding your sorrow in its hands.
Another variant on the core tension manifests itself most memorably in “Fricatives” itself, where the ‘irreverent thrill’ mentioned by Yip in that 2023 interview is experienced by the reader, with a vicarious rush of stunned amusement. The poem’s speaker, having begun with a series of almost prissily precise remarks from his English teacher, highlighting the phonological correctness required for full adaptation to his new home, continues to refer to the workings of his mouth, but suddenly goes ‘in-yer-face’ (in this case, quite literally):
You will receive a good education
abroad and make your parents proud. You will take
a stranger’s cock in your mouth in the piss-slick stall
of that dingy Cantonese restaurant you love…
One has to agree with Howe’s admiring tones when she notes, ‘Again and again in exposure, a composed poetic intelligence comes up against a coiled sensuality, and the collision of the two is breathtaking’. But just as the supposedly prudish is rudely interrupted in “Fricatives”, so alongside or underneath the frequent tenderness, something more sinister pervades much of this pamphlet. Inspired by the work of Victorian photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, “[Movement is the replacement of one]” recalls those falling buffaloes, through its relentless, frame-by-frame examination of domestic violence: ‘why did he hit her why did the palm / decide to curl like a mimosa post-touch’. “[The creator who may or may not exist]” juxtaposes the meting out of cold-blooded homophobic punishment with a polished poet’s expert alliteration:
as brimstone rains down as punches
on a queer’s face a knuckled chastisement
by passersby or peers or petrol poured
over disowned heads under cypresses
It’s as if Yip wanted to prove he has not been intimidated out of that noted composure, as his poetic skills counter the horrendous assault, at least inwardly.
In perhaps the finest poem of all, “Tear”, compassion definitely overcomes whatever hint of previous violence might underlie the speaker’s father’s lachrymose plea for forgiveness, and Yip once demonstrates an explicit pride in his artistry, with an especially effective handling of enjambement:
Never have I seen a man break
so completely, as if a vast crevasse
had unzipped his life.
One would need to be better versed than I in Chinese culture and language to fully understand all of Yip’s almost Eliotian range of references, even though many are helpfully expounded, in Waste Land style, at the pamphlet’s end. However, anyone familiar with Ezra Pound’s Cathay, based on the work of eighth-century Chinese poet Li Bai (known as Rihaku), will appreciate “Hearsay”, where the cultural disjuncture so unavoidable in translation and interpretation is wryly spelt out through a double-dose of indirect speech (‘Pound said Rihaku said the phoenix are gone, the river flows on alone’). And quoting the famous final words of Beckett’s The Unnamable provides a fitting end to “Doppelgänger”, in which a historical warning against photographic trickery gives way to a more human focus on departure and separation:
Our mother’s Anita CDs: to whom
do they belong now? You ceded
tasks I complete alone, burdened me
with incorrigible words like departure
or forever. I resent us, doppelgänger.
I call you from the other side of the shore.
You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
For someone still in their early twenties to be producing work of this quality truly bodes well for their future poetic career, and Yip’s first full-length collection will be a justifiably significant event, as and when it materialises.
Feb 28 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Eric Yip
Poetry review – exposure: Nick Cooke is impressed by this debut chapbook from Eric Yip
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Eric Yip burst onto the UK scene through his stunning victory in the 2021 National Poetry Competition, at which point he was a Cambridge undergraduate of just 19, with ‘Fricatives’, described by judge Rachel Long as ‘a rubber raft’ attempting to make its way through the murky and treacherous waters of language, race, migration, and of being heard’. In the author’s own words the poem picks up on what Henri Cole once said, that the lyric poem presents ‘an X-ray of the self in a moment of being’. ‘Even if I didn’t know it at the time,’ Yip commented in a 2023 interview, ‘this X-ray was what I was attempting to capture: the guilt, homesickness, and irreverent thrill that melded together into an inseparable mass of emotion during my first months in the UK.’ That concept of imaging has continued to be a central one for Yip, as this extraordinarily mature and assured first pamphlet makes clear.
The 20-poem collection’s title is effective because its one word combines vulnerability (what or who is exposed) with the possible agents of that state (photographs, primarily, but also other artistic forms such as film, art and literature). This is the dichotomy that Sarah Howe – the T.S. Eliot-prize-winning poet whom Yip credits with making him realise he could write about Hong Kong – is in part pointing up when she notes, ‘Eric Yip is possessed of a humanely tender eye, drawn to and haunted by the moments of vulnerability that reveal us, stripped back, in our truest contours.’ There’s an unspoken contradiction here: the eye’s tenderness is actually questioned, even challenged, by its parallel propensity for stripping, as is crystallised in a particularly memorable later line, the final one of “[First they began cutting the world]”:
until detritus bloated the landfills until a state of order was restored until there was nothing left to carve but the eyeThe elliptical syntax allows the eye to be both the carved and the carver, the stripper-away and the revealed, the controller and the controlled. Additionally, in terms of extra layering, the enormous capacity for punning which Yip has indicated is rife in Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) might lead us to suspect, if we allow the poet might quite reasonably have transferred such playfulness to his writing in English, that ‘eye’ can also be heard as ‘I’.
The pamphlet’s opening salvo, “Ardently Love”, focusses on American photographer and AIDS-awareness activist Paul Wojnarowicz, specifically his iconic (Untitled) Buffaloes, with its four buffaloes seen in various stages of falling off a cliff. Having touched on the plight and perspective of all four doomed animals, Yip gives us an arrestingly new viewpoint, that of the cliff:
The link with gay men and AIDS, already set up through a sub-titular Mandarin allusion glossed as ‘lit. AIDS guy (neologism, colloquial, derogatory) a gay man’ is brought to the fore at the poem’s end. In a sudden flashback, Yip regresses to an adolescent period, suggesting an unworldly innocence that’s actually belied both by the poem hitherto, and his precociously shrewd coming-of-age-style conclusion, as he considers the metaphorical significance of the animals’ helpless, unforeseen plunge towards destruction:
In other words, there can be no persecution without the persecutors. A similar theme is invoked by another take on teenage perception, through the rampant bullying and sexual violence portrayed in the film All About Lily Chou-Chou. That poem, “Broadway Cinematique”, memorably ends with a different angle on the pamphlet’s essential paradox. Yip posits someone apparently in control – a cinema-goer entering the auditorium, of their own free will – being suddenly exposed to (and by) the emotional content of the film they’ve come to see:
Someday you might walk in and find a story already holding your sorrow in its hands.Another variant on the core tension manifests itself most memorably in “Fricatives” itself, where the ‘irreverent thrill’ mentioned by Yip in that 2023 interview is experienced by the reader, with a vicarious rush of stunned amusement. The poem’s speaker, having begun with a series of almost prissily precise remarks from his English teacher, highlighting the phonological correctness required for full adaptation to his new home, continues to refer to the workings of his mouth, but suddenly goes ‘in-yer-face’ (in this case, quite literally):
One has to agree with Howe’s admiring tones when she notes, ‘Again and again in exposure, a composed poetic intelligence comes up against a coiled sensuality, and the collision of the two is breathtaking’. But just as the supposedly prudish is rudely interrupted in “Fricatives”, so alongside or underneath the frequent tenderness, something more sinister pervades much of this pamphlet. Inspired by the work of Victorian photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, “[Movement is the replacement of one]” recalls those falling buffaloes, through its relentless, frame-by-frame examination of domestic violence: ‘why did he hit her why did the palm / decide to curl like a mimosa post-touch’. “[The creator who may or may not exist]” juxtaposes the meting out of cold-blooded homophobic punishment with a polished poet’s expert alliteration:
as brimstone rains down as punches on a queer’s face a knuckled chastisement by passersby or peers or petrol poured over disowned heads under cypressesIt’s as if Yip wanted to prove he has not been intimidated out of that noted composure, as his poetic skills counter the horrendous assault, at least inwardly.
In perhaps the finest poem of all, “Tear”, compassion definitely overcomes whatever hint of previous violence might underlie the speaker’s father’s lachrymose plea for forgiveness, and Yip once demonstrates an explicit pride in his artistry, with an especially effective handling of enjambement:
Never have I seen a man break so completely, as if a vast crevasse had unzipped his life.One would need to be better versed than I in Chinese culture and language to fully understand all of Yip’s almost Eliotian range of references, even though many are helpfully expounded, in Waste Land style, at the pamphlet’s end. However, anyone familiar with Ezra Pound’s Cathay, based on the work of eighth-century Chinese poet Li Bai (known as Rihaku), will appreciate “Hearsay”, where the cultural disjuncture so unavoidable in translation and interpretation is wryly spelt out through a double-dose of indirect speech (‘Pound said Rihaku said the phoenix are gone, the river flows on alone’). And quoting the famous final words of Beckett’s The Unnamable provides a fitting end to “Doppelgänger”, in which a historical warning against photographic trickery gives way to a more human focus on departure and separation:
Our mother’s Anita CDs: to whom do they belong now? You ceded tasks I complete alone, burdened me with incorrigible words like departure or forever. I resent us, doppelgänger. I call you from the other side of the shore. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.For someone still in their early twenties to be producing work of this quality truly bodes well for their future poetic career, and Yip’s first full-length collection will be a justifiably significant event, as and when it materialises.