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"If Yang Lian is new to you, I hope it spurs you on to read more of this extraordinary poet. If you have read him before, then you will find familiar themes here: the search for a mature wisdom, the need to readjust the balance between modernism and the classical heritage, the impossibility of giving easy solutions to the problem of evil and suffering in this world. There is also a new sense of his coming to terms with the devastating loss of his mother when he was a teenager, which is when he began writing poetry, as well as intimate and tenderly-voiced declarations of the power of love in its many forms. There is, too, a growing sense of poetry as a weapon in the fight to heal this planet of ours, so wounded by greed, war, exploitation and plunder.
This is large poetry, deep poetry, poetry that concerns itself with the great human themes. This is poetry that can change your life." -Brian Holton, from the Afterword to this volume
Info autore
Yang Lian was born in Switzerland in 1955, and grew up in Beijing. He began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return to Beijing he became one of the founders of the 'Misty' school of contemporary Chinese poetry. Among other things, Yang Lian is known for his poem sequences and long poems which display a profound understanding of, and creative links with, Classical Chinese poetry. His poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when his sequence 'Norilang' was criticized by the Chinese government during the 'Anti-Spiritual Pollution' movement.Yang Lian was invited to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1988 and became a poet in exile after the Tiananmen massacre. Since that time, he has continued to write and speak out as a highly individual voice in world literature, politics and culture. Yang Lian has published twelve collections of poems, two collections of prose and many essays (selected into several selections) in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than thirty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Central and Eastern European languages.His work has been described as being "like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!", as "one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature" and as "one of the great world poets of our era".
