From Publishers Weekly
Bei Dao ( Old Snow ), a prominent poet and Chinese dissident, has been living in exile since the Tiananmen protest. This bilingual collection is also a protest, though not in any overt sense. Rather, its exposure of the pain of exile evokes both a man who has lost his country and a country that has lost its voice. Even from exile, poetry holds out the possibility of liberation: "a song / is an ever hostile tree / across the border," Bei Dao writes. Exile permits speech. Yet, as his work also shows, exile enforces rootlessness and a detachment from the poet's sources and the site of conflict, inducing "a strange homesickness." Condemnation mingles with despair. The poems reflect the influence of ancient Chinese poetry, and also the work of modern Western poets, particularly in the use of surrealistic imagery. The images here are usually oblique, mysterious and resonant. There is perhaps a veiled warning in the poems not simply to lionize the poet for political courage, but to appreciate him as someone who, regardless of time and place, can imagine the world.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Absent
Advertising
Afternoon Notes
Allegiance
Andante
Asking The Sky
At The Sky's Edge
Autumn World In Turmoil
Beyond
Brass Of A Summer's Day
Bridge
Coming To My Senses
Contact
Corridor
Eastern Traveler
Empty City
Exit
Farewell Words
Flash
Folding Procedure
For T. Transtromer
Forlorn
A Guide To Summer
Headlong Night
Lament
Landscape
Midnight Singer
Musical Variations
A New Century
Night Patrol
On Eternity
Other Than Tomorrow
Pastoral
Playwright
A Portrait
Records
Sower
A State Of War
Toxin
Untitled
Untitled
Year's End
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
The poems in Gustaf Sobin's newest collection, Breaths' Burials establish a dialogue with silence. Here the "Breath" literally gets "buried" - as Gustaf Sobin has said "like seed, like tubers - in a language that awaits its own regeneration: 'buried," too, very much like the breath of love within the body of the beloved. " Whether Sobin is writing about irises, Venetian architecture, or the wind-blown plateaus of his adopted Provence, his poems search for the redemptive, celebrating the rebirth of language out of itself. Breaths' Burials are fragments of word music lacking only the reader's voice to make them come alive and sing to the ear, the heart, the mind, and the soul. -- Midwest Book Review
Advertising
Afternoon Notes
Allegiance
Andante
Asking The Sky
At The Sky's Edge
Autumn World In Turmoil
Beyond
Brass Of A Summer's Day
Bridge
Coming To My Senses
Contact
Corridor
Eastern Traveler
Empty City
Exit
Farewell Words
Flash
Folding Procedure
For T. Transtromer
Forlorn
A Guide To Summer
Headlong Night
Lament
Landscape
Midnight Singer
Musical Variations
A New Century
Night Patrol
On Eternity
Other Than Tomorrow
Pastoral
Playwright
A Portrait
Records
Sower
A State Of War
Toxin
Untitled
Untitled
Year's End
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
The poems in Gustaf Sobin's newest collection, Breaths' Burials establish a dialogue with silence. Here the "Breath" literally gets "buried" - as Gustaf Sobin has said "like seed, like tubers - in a language that awaits its own regeneration: 'buried," too, very much like the breath of love within the body of the beloved. " Whether Sobin is writing about irises, Venetian architecture, or the wind-blown plateaus of his adopted Provence, his poems search for the redemptive, celebrating the rebirth of language out of itself. Breaths' Burials are fragments of word music lacking only the reader's voice to make them come alive and sing to the ear, the heart, the mind, and the soul. -- Midwest Book Review
