Unlock
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 recent 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...
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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.Andrew Ervin[F]ew living writers possess a voice as elegant as that heard in Unlock. —Philadelphia Inquirer
\ \ \ \ \ Excerpt\ \ \ JUNE\ \ \ Wind at the ear says June\ June a blacklist I slipped\ in time\ note this way to say goodbye\ the sighs within these words\ \ note these annotations:\ unending plastic flowers\ on the dead left bank\ the cement square extending\ from writing to\ now\ I run from writing\ as dawn is hammered out\ a flag covers the sea\ and loudspeakers loyal to the sea's\ deep bass say June\ \ \ READING\ \ \ Taste the unnecessary tears\ your star stays\ alit still for one charmed day\ a hand is birth's\ most expressive thing\ a word changes\ dancing\ in search of its roots\ read the text of summer\ the moonlight from which\ that person drinks tea\ is the true golden age\ for disciples of crows in the ruins\ all the subservient meanings\ broke fingernails\ all the growing smoke\ seeped into the promises\ taste the unnecessary sea\ the salt betrayed\ \ \ REQUIEM\ for Shanshan\ \ \ The wave of that year\ flooded the sands on the mirror\ to be lost is a kind of leaving\ and the meaning of leaving\ the instant when all languages\ are like shadows cast from the west\ life's only apromise\ don't grieve for it\ before the garden was destroyed\ we had too much time\ debating the implications of a bird flying\ as we knocked down midnight's door\ alone like a match polished into light\ when childhood's tunnel\ led to a vein of dubious ore\ to be lost is a kind of leaving\ and poetry rectifying life\ rectifies poetry's echo\ \ \ UNTITLED\ \ \ Rubbing this bruise I see an instant of brilliance\ a slaking axe startles a sea on strike awake\ all the keys are inserted in the same night\ lamplight\ how calm the times exposed on earth\ like the rooftop that splits the floodwaters\ the changing climate of the fate of birds\ known by a wind that reads the fingerprints of moonlight\ throw a stone to ask the way the book ten times reality\ obstructs the calling of the witnesses\ all existing doubts point toward love\ in the presence of a dead friend whose smile floats up\ \ \ MISTAKE\ \ \ Solo saxophone\ weaves rain into night\ weaves a temple into lamplight\ lets dead water grow bones\ that wander about\ it's not that there is no honor\ I let the bad weather turn\ into the topic of roses\ examining youth\ with a double-edged razor\ one proper face\ the barber clips\ unnecessary years\ still all right\ to pass a mirror\ slowly rusting\ in another era\ around me\ people doing business giving lectures\ without a sound
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\ Amy DiBelloThe impeccably constructed verses eventually yield a universe of intricate wonders populated with dazzling metaphors and shattering symbolism. \ — Weekly Alibi\ \ \ \ \ Amy DiBelloThe impeccably constructed verses eventually yield a universe of intricate wonders populated with dazzling metaphors and shattering symbolism. —Weekly Alibi\ \ \ Andrew Ervin[F]ew living writers possess a voice as elegant as that heard in Unlock. —Philadelphia Inquirer\ \ \ \ \ Pacific ReaderI highly recommend this book.\ \ \ \ \ Philadelphia Inquirer[F]ew living writers possess a voice as elegant as that heard in Unlock.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyIn 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 Cahners Business Information.\|\ \
