Since the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s, Yang Lian has forged complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
Yang Lian is perhaps the foremost of the new generation of Chinese poets whose forcible exile from their native land has had the happy, if unintended, effect of bringing them to the attention of more Western readers than they could ever have reached from home. Forbidden to publish in China after 1983, Yang Lian was expelled in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre and now lives in London. Holton's edition is laid out in facing-page translations that will be much appreciated by scholars while also giving the impression of a samizdat (which, in a sense, it is). The omnipresent gloom of the poems themselves ("your standstill is as full as the ocean's madness / the fullness of solitude makes an ear think long / in every dry shell predators have been drained of fresh blood") never descends into rant or bitterness, and there their harsh fortitude ("see this joy / a dog tricked into running madly away") owes as much to Chinese tradition as to politics. Holton's afterword provides a good insight into Yang Lian and his work. (Kirkus Reviews)
