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Where the Sea Stands Still | Bloodaxe Books
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Yang Lian

Where the Sea Stands Still

Yang Lian

TRANSLATED BY BRIAN HOLTON

Publication Date : 29 Apr 1999

ISBN: 9781852244712

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

Chinese-English bilingual edition

Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s – most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether – Yang Lian has gone on to forge a mature and complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West.

His poems can be disturbing and strange, haunted as they are by the eerie ordinariness of life and death. But in the end it is a triumphant poetry, wholly engaged with the struggle to be alert to life, wholly engaged in the daily renewal, the search for that ‘shore / where we see ourselves set sail’.

All the poems are presented in English and Chinese. Brian Holton also includes a fascinating memoir on translating Yang Lian as well as one sequence translated into Scots.

‘Yang Lian is one of the most astonishing poets I've read for years. He has a westernist, modernist sensibility allied with an ancient Chinese, almost shamanistic one. He can both excite and frighten you – like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!’ – W.N. Herbert, Scotsman

‘He continues his work bridging Chinese tradition to western modernism. The scope of his creative imagination is astounding …Yang Lian is one of the great world poets of our era’ – Klaus Rifberg, Edinburgh Review

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he became a future Nobel Laureate. His style is one of extraordinary grandeur and ambition… Without question, the sequence Where the Sea Stands Still has a monumental drive, a sensuous strength and intellectual clarity; it could prove as enduring an achievement as Montale’s Xenia or Elytis’s The Axion Esti’ – David Morley, Stand

 

Yang Lian on Concentric Circles

Chinese poet Yang Lian talks about his book Concentric Circles in English, and then reads the first part of the first poem in Chinese. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley, which includes poems by Yang Lian from both Concentric Circles and Where the Sea Stands Still read in Chinese and discussed in English.

 

USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org

Chinese-English bilingual edition

  

BOOKS BY Yang Lian

A Tower Built Downwards

Yang Lian

A Tower Built Downwards

一座向下修建的塔

Publication Date : 23 Mar 2023

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Concentric Circles

Yang Lian

Concentric Circles

Publication Date : 23 Jun 2005

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Jade Ladder

W.N. Herbert

Jade Ladder

Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Publication Date : 16 Apr 2012

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Lee Valley Poems

Yang Lian

Lee Valley Poems

Publication Date : 22 Oct 2009

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