School of Distance Education

Yangtze 
by Sarah Howe 
Sarah Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983 to 
an English father and Chinese mother, and moved to 
England as a child. She studied English at 
Cambridge.Sarah was a Poetry Society Young Poet of 
the Year in 2000 . She won an Eric Gregory Award from 
the Society of Authors in 2010. Her first collection, 
Loop 
of Jade
was published by Chatto&Windus in 2014 and 
was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First 
Collection. 
Loop of Jade
crosses boundaries of time, 
place and space. It interrogates what it means to belong – 
to a race, a country, a family. Her poetry aesthetically 
striking, precisely painted often grapples with Cultural 
identity and representation. Her poetry is highly playful 
and inventive.Howe's poetry is marked by a deep 
fascination with the ways in which poetic imagery that 
enables human connection across geographical and 
cultural distance and across time. 
In both Sarah Howe's poetry and non fiction, 
Yangtze emerges as a major element. Yangtze is the 
concluding poem in Sarah Howe’s 
Loop of Jade
, her 
TSEliot prize-winning poetry collection.
Loop of Jade
isHowe’s first collection, in part an account of the poet’s 
journey to Hong Kong and China to learn about her and 
her mother’s past. Howe gathers an extended
commentary on her return visits to mainland China and 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
9 
Hong Kong, where she lived until she was just shy of 
eight years old. The poem goes with the flow of the river 
while accommodating the physicality of the journey.
 
Loop of Jade
crosses boundaries of time, place and 
space. It interrogates what it means to belong to a race, a 
country, a family.
‘Yangtze’, might be read as an evocation. . A 
moon glimmers uncertainly on water’s surfaces, a river 
flows, a diving bird vanishes into it, fishermen’s nets 
catch on something submerged, a bridge remains only 
“half-built”, a travelling boat merely “points” to its 
destination.
References