{"id":45084,"date":"2016-01-13T15:29:49","date_gmt":"2016-01-13T15:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45084"},"modified":"2016-01-13T15:29:49","modified_gmt":"2016-01-13T15:29:49","slug":"book-review-loop-of-jade-by-sarah-howe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45084","title":{"rendered":"Book review: Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Book review: <\/strong><\/em>Loop of Jade<\/strong> by Sarah Howe<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Scotsman: Scotland’s National Newspaper<\/a>
\n2015-05-03<\/p>\n

Roger Cox<\/strong><\/a>, Arts Editor<\/p>\n

Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade<\/a><\/em> (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015)<\/strong><\/p>\n

DOUBLE takes haunt poet Sarah Howe<\/a> on her return to memory\u2019s fragrant harbour, writes Roger Cox<\/em><\/p>\n

In her poem Sirens, Sarah Howe<\/a> writes \u201cI had one of those blurrings \u2013 glitch, then focus \u2013 \/ like a put-off optician\u2019s trip, when you realise \/ how long you\u2019ve been seeing things wrongly.\u201d This sinuous, shimmering, mirage-like debut collection is littered with such moments of sudden realisation, and also haunted by the suspicion that there must be more to everything than meets the eye.<\/p>\n

In Sirens, the blurring occurs when, reflecting on a line in a poem by Theodore Roethke<\/a>, Howe suddenly twigs that a description of a girl\u2019s \u201csidelong pickerel smile\u201d is not a reference to juvenile pike, as she had always supposed, but to a small wading bird.<\/p>\n

She knows she must now update her mental image of the girl from fish to fowl, yet try as she might she can\u2019t shake the original image of the girl\u2019s fishy grin. Could both images be right? Did the poet intend the double meaning?…<\/p>\n

…Howe was born in Hong Kong<\/a> in 1983 to an English father and a Chinese mother, and moved to England<\/a> as a child. She still has vivid memories of her time as a schoolgirl in Hong Kong \u2013 as demonstrated by the wonderfully evocative poem Islands, in which she recalls the girls at her boarding school sleeping three to a bed shelf, \u201clike dumplings stacked in steamers\u201d \u2013 but this collection is billed as a voyage of discovery, a journey in search of her roots…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book review: Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe The Scotsman: Scotland’s National Newspaper 2015-05-03 Roger Cox, Arts Editor Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015) DOUBLE takes haunt poet Sarah Howe on her return to memory\u2019s fragrant harbour, writes Roger Cox In her poem Sirens, Sarah Howe writes \u201cI had one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,5,8],"tags":[22604,22600,22602,22603],"class_list":["post-45084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","tag-roger-cox","tag-sarah-howe","tag-the-scotsman","tag-the-scotsman-scotlands-national-newspaper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45084"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45085,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45084\/revisions\/45085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}