This book is a "book of essays" like Li-Young Lee's "Winged Seed" was a "memoir."

Meaning: these guys are (brilliant) poets. What they write--it seems--no matter the intention--comes out poetry.

This book is like listening to notes carried on the wind. It's so beautiful, so intense yet gentle; it begins with remembrances of Allen Ginsberg and just

travels.

If you like Bei Dao's poetry, you'll love this book.

In this fine-tuned book of intimate essays, China's premier poet--only he's not in China, you see--and descendent of surrealism lets us in on some of the lyrical details of his life & times. The essays range from his friends to his love of gambling, his daughter to what he thinks about cats and dogs, always w/ an impressively lyrical sense of synecdoche: his restraint and ability not to go overboard signal to the gestalt of his--and other poets', dissidents', exiles'--life at the end of the 20th century. Expertly and subtly translated, Huters & Ming let Bei Dao's Chinese breathe in English, granting us w/ a voice that, I'm afraid, not enough people will read.

Without the brilliance of David Hinton and Yanbing Chen we wouldn't know, we couldn't know how great Bei Dao is. Bei Tao may be China's first Noble Laureate in Literature. If so he'll have these fine translators to thank for making his work so convincingly available in a major Western language.

Bei Dao's poems gleam like white dwarfs. Each poem bears the intense pressure of its own inner light. They are compressed songs, wrestling with terror and beauty, politics, metaphor, home, exile. The poems exist in that moment of being on the verge, an expectancy. They exist in that moment of waiting that can only be human hope, ready to glow despite the forces that try to thwart it.

Even in translation Bei Dao's poetry has a dark and quiet strength to it. The poems have a life about them, so that you could read them once and get one thing out of it and then read it again and get another. His style, even when dealing with politics, doesn't try to force its point. Rather, it slowly sinks in-- in a matter-of-fact way. When I read a book of poetry I tend to dog-ear the pages of poems that strike me in a special way. By the time I was done with this one almost the entire book was marked. The style of poetry is especially clean, yet has the flare of spontaneity. Bei Dao's poems are especially interesting to me as a poet, because the language of Chinese poetry exiled out of China tends to be one of his primary concerns. This is a book highly worth reading-- and reading again.

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.

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.