Radio Days is the first book of poems by Ha Jae Yeon, who began her career as a poet when she won the first Literature and Society Newcomer’s Literature Prize for Poetry in 2002. This book, which is composed of fifty-six poems chosen from the poems she wrote over five years, focuses, as the poet’s confession that “I don’t believe what I’ve seen” evokes, on the strange images that form when faced with objects and time, and from that point recreates the memory of time, speed, and the daily life that makes us look into a different time’s gaps. The book also contains traces of the landscape that the poet experienced while living in Virginia in 2005.

In Radio Days, moments and places we commonly see around us appear often, such as clouds, benches, parks, a window with sunlight on it, the television screen, the comic shop at the mouth of an alley, drowsy afternoons, the iron front gate of a house in a shabby neighborhood. With each moment-in-time and place, the poet repeats questions about the flow of time and memory of uncertainty. The interiority of the poetic subject which describes the landscape does not reveal itself overtly. Rather, people and objects, events, discontinuous time and space are arranged without concern for organic or metaphorical relations.

Ha Ja Yeon was born in Seoul in 1975 and received undergraduate and graduate degrees in Korean Literature at Korea University. She won the first Newcomer’s Literature Prize for Poetry given by the journal Literature and Society in 2002 and began her literary career. She has published two books of poetry, Radio Days and All the Beaches of the World. Ha’s poetry keeps its distance from the same generation of young poets who debuted after 2000 and commonly called the futurists and their common components, especially abstruse and subversive imagination and the flow of their form and phenomenon. Simultaneously, “at the tip of the tongue but unspoken” figures of speech and descriptions slightly skew the common, the familiar, and the traditional grammar of the lyric. From everywhere in the collection, commonplace words such as “regardless” and “nevertheless” shake up each poem’s chronological and spatial composition and guide the reader from familiarity into alien spaces. With its gaze it implodes lyric poetry’s aesthetic source, moment and compression.

“The difficulty is a question of conviction That cloud seems to have decided to stay in one spot for five minutes After five minutes the cloud may ceaselessly change shape The important thing is the five minutes of my looking at it” —from “Five Minutes”

“A fig seed somebody spat out a few million years ago may be hanging from my side I cover myself like a blanket that fine strands of dust wove by hand For some time now every time I try to remember the bright light that blazed on the breath of the ground that passed me by, my side hurt

I am not trying to say that I came over for so long I could no longer remember the quiet afternoon The task of opening the body to the crevices of time and the long long course of day and night the flakes of dead skin that floats down from the sky, the ceiling grows remote”

—from “Old Bed”

Across the entire collection, the poet’s eye that lies on objects and phenomena that appear to be at a standstill but are in constant motion, as well as slices of life, such as “The shadows dye into many colors,” “A bicycle’s silver wheels roll into the dark”, “the air / wavers briefly” (“Whistling), “Old men gestate old men / and children gestate children” (“The Children Grow”), brings forth a different compression and concentration. The poet’s voice seems uninterested in the subjects that it glances at, but in truth it penetrates them all with clarity and creates an opportunity to look anew at the relationship between the self and the subject. Meanwhile, the maximally restrained voice, the series of poetic language that is both dry and plain, and the organization of the concise lines and stanzas harmonize well and lead the reader into a peculiar, immersive world. From beginning to end, by portraying the person “passing by,” “looking in,” and “who can’t remember” (“Sunday’s Antique Shop), the work achieves a fixed distance between objects and the poetic speaker, or between the poem and the reader, and in the end serves to make us accept old familiarity with strangeness.

The poet’s “black pupils become windows,” “receive all light well” (“Symbiotic Phase”), and finally “pupils that have become transparent” (“Foam”) tell about the world reflected in them. But instead of passively revealing their inner contents, they constantly doubt their own gaze. And they ask repeatedly of everything in front of them “What was it?” or “What is it?” Ha’s poetry that investigates with a high-density electric microscope the fingerprints and dust in lieu of the depth of time seems to be “as light as a joke” (“Stella Beauty Parlor”) but is never ordinary.

“If you can’t understand my words

that isn’t my intention

Isn’t that right?

Someday you’ll come to love someone

and when the light goes on in the street

I’ll go out onto the street

Someday just like the streetlamp going off and on

you’ll meet someone

and I’ll have light pouring down on me in the street

Although my will is only my own” —from “Life Only My Own”

Without emotional agitation and full of dry and moderated poetic language, Radio Days speaks unperturbed about its simple and lucid subjects and even without grotesque fantasy allows us to experience modernity overflowing with familiar, coercive, and excessive words in a different way.