Unlock [Paperback]

Beidao (Author), Bei Dao (Author), Eliot Weinberger (Translator), Iona Man-Cheong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2000

New poetry by the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet-in-exile. Bei Dao, the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet, has been the poetic conscience of the dissident movements in his country for over twenty years. He has been in exile since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Unlock presents forty-nine new poems written in the United States, and may well be Bei Dao's most powerful work to date. Complex, full of startling and sometimes surreal imagery, sudden transitions, and oblique political references, and often embedding bits of bureaucratic speech and unexpected slang, his poetry has been compared to that of Paul Celan and Cesar Vallejo: poets who invented a new poetry and a new language in the attempt to speak of the enormity of their times. The sixth book of Bei Dao's work published by New Directions, Unlock has been translated by Eliot Weinberger, the distinguished essayist and critically acclaimed translator of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, in collaboration with the historian Iona Man-Cheong and the poet himself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In America, exiled poet Bei Dao (a pen name) is the best-known member of the Misty School, a group of Chinese poets now in their 40s and 50s. In China, Bei Dao's American-influenced poems were thought to have helped inspire the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. (He has reportedly been often shortlisted for the Nobel Prize.) This fifth collection to be translated here presents more of the weird, breathless poems that are his signature, and owe as much to the thrifty paradoxes and mood lighting of Tom Waits's songs as to more standard voices of dissent. "The newspaper boy sets out in the morning/ all over town the sound of a desolate trumpet/ is it your bad omen or mine?" he writes in "Delivering Newspapers"; "Leaving Home" ends with the quatrain: "at night the wind steals bells/ the long-haired bride/ quivers like a bowstring/ over the body of the groom." Solo instruments in fact appear, like "crowds of strangers," in almost every poem, and readers will wonder whether the melancholy is better sustained in the original versions of the poems, since it often falls apart here. Translators Weinberger and Man-Cheong follow David Hinton's precedent with a (mainly) punctuation-free verse that accommodates Bei Dao's odder phrases ("authorized blizzard," "mint-flavored mailman"), but also calls attention to the botched getaways of many of the endings ("sound of the beginning/ color of the end" closes "Time and the Road"; "someone climbs a ladder/ out of sight from the audience" finishes "Deformation"). More annoying is the use of the continuous present to yoke poetic-seeming details together arbitrarily, which comes off as an intent to mystify, one that is not back up by the poems as presented. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Balcony
Call
Crying
Deformation
Deleting
Delivering Newspapers
Destination
Driving
Dry Season
Etude
Fifth Street
Going Home
The Hunt
In Memory
June
Leaving Home
Mission
Mistake
Moat
A Moment Against The Light
Montage
Moon Festival
Morning Song
Night Sky
Night Tree
No
The Old Castle
Poppy Night
Post
Postwar
Reading
Requiem
Silence And Trembling
Smells
Soap
Spending The Night
Spirit Game
Substitute-teaching
Swivel Chair
Teacher's Manual
Time And The Road
Transparency
Unlock
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled
Writing A Letter
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

I highly recommend this book. -- Pacific Reader, Andrea Lingenfelter, Spring 2001

The impeccably constructed verses eventually yield a universe of intricate wonders populated with dazzling metaphors and shattering symbolism. -- Weekly Alibi, Amy DiBello, 14 December 2000

[F]ew living writers possess a voice as elegant as that heard in Unlock. -- Philadelphia Inquirer, Andre Ervin, 22 January 2001

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811214478
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214476
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,651,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Poetry of Exile, December 8, 2000

By 

J. Gossett "stemrisa" (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unlock (Paperback)

This is a wonderful collection of Bei Dao's most recent works. What I love most about his poetry is the way it grapples with language in a way that is not quite surreal but not concrete either. Many of the poems are self reflective in that they ponder what it means to be a poet writing and thinking in a language that is not the same as the places of his "exile" (Western Europe and the United States). Although, in my opinion, the book of poetry prior to this collection, called Old Snow, is an even stronger statement on these issues. You can tell from the poetry that the current political situation of China, and an alienation are still fresh in Bei Dao's mind (I have talked briefly with Bei Dao about some of these issues). I have no doubt that he will find a place as one of the great poets of the modern age.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars exile, yes, beautiful & necessary exile, January 2, 2002

By 

"hirofantv" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unlock (Paperback)

the book, also, never mentions barbed wire but makes barbed wire come to mind. Bei Dao's writing is some of the most pressing, urgent poetry I have ever read. The man is a great poetic genius. With lines about such things as the wind closing its iron fist, Bei Dao speaks with power & elegance against repression & of the absolute importance of the individual. This book is very important. Bei Dao has made himself a significant man. Context of human value. According to Jonathan Spence from the New York Times Book Review, Bei Dao "was obliged to create a new poetic idiom that was simultaneously a protective camouflage and an appropriate vehicle for 'unreality.'" According to highly respected poet Robert Hass, "[A Bei Dao poem] feels as if it follows the pulse of consciousness, as it moves from metaphor to metaphor, thought to thought, something like a pilot light turned down to the jets and flickers of a single, intense, blue flame." Something else that's nice about this book is that it's bilingual, & Bei Dao was active in the translation process.