The Ninjas

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Jane Yeh's debut collection, Marabou (2005), which was nominated for the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, charmed with its cast of idiosyncratic voices, including an owl from Harry Potter and a flock of sheep about to be culled. The jacket of her second collection, The Ninjas, features a pinata carrying out an autopsy on another that appears to have been battered to death for its sweet interior. And as that might suggest, The Ninjas is just as eccentric as Yeh's debut, populated by androids, sentient lilies, yeti, kittens, talking portraits and, of course, ninjas.

It starts with the characteristically bizarre 'After the Attack of the Crystalline Entity', a poem that gives a voice to an android in an episode of Star Trek in which various colonies are destroyed by a huge crystal-like being. As peculiar as this sounds as a concept for a poem, Yeh gives her subject dignity, treating the fate of a servant android stuck on a post-apocalyptic planet with a gravity that such a circumstance would, in reality, merit, and ending with the haunting lines, 'This is an experiment on / Myself: how many days does it take / To give up waiting for anyone to come home?'. Yeh again shows her skill in inspiring ominous horror in 'The Night-Lily', which convincingly renders the flower into a (possibly carnivorous) monster, while the three poems on the forbiddingly named Deception Island in Antarctica also combine a sense of menace with taut economy: 'The snow falls as fast / As the heart pounding in your chest, until / Something comes to arrest it like love, only worse'.

Most of the poems, however, are more light-hearted; another android poem, for example, contains the fancifully humorous line, 'My first crush was a Roomba I mistook for a person'. The collection contains a group of poems that follow a set pattern of describing the characteristics of various creatures on the fringes of reality in impassive, end-stopped lines. The flat tone in which they deliver their often fantastic 'facts' is, again, charming, but the book would have been improved by omitting a few of them - their strangeness is of the same kind and can sometimes feel predictable. But a little excess is a small price to pay for this unashamedly and joyfully quirky second collection.