MCLC: Sky Lanterns review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Sky Lanterns review
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Source: Honolulu Weekly (11/7/12):
http://honoluluweekly.com/story-continued/2012/11/lit-up-by-language/

Lit Up by Language
In Sky Lanterns, contemporary Chinese poetry illuminates complicated
terrain
BY JANINE OSHIRO

LITERARY / Even for the well-versed poetry enthusiast, Chinese poetry can
begin and end with the short bangs of “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” But
we’ve traveled far from Ezra Pound’s translation of that eighth century
love letter. The road from Cho-Fu-Sa veers and switchbacks to the White
Terror, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, sweatshop labor, and
Richard Gere’s plea for a free Tibet. Not to mention, the trees dressed
according to season and the everyday vicissitudes of light. Edited by
Frank Stewart and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Sky Lanterns: New Poetry from China,
Formosa, and Beyond illuminates this complicated terrain with stunning and
provocative poems, prose, and photography.

“Ancient Enmity,” the opening essay by Bei Dao, a poet in exile since
1989, acts as a manifesto for the work that follows. Standing apart from
society, writers must confront the oppressive nature of both the “official
language” of the past and the “lingual rubbish” of the present: “Writers
must recognize this reality, and through their work restore the freshness,
plenitude, and incisiveness of language–and its power to contemplate and
name the world anew.” The poets in Sky Lanterns accept Bei Dao’s charge.

Yi Lu’s poem “Is There Such an Eagle” is an example of renaming and
remaking through image and interrogation: “Is there an eagle who admits in
its cherry-sized heart / there is no lightning no storm no hail / just an
urge of warm blood.” The eagle in this poem transforms into a creature
strangely tender and afraid. Wei An’s “Life on Earth” startles with its
attentiveness to descriptions of the natural world juxtaposed with surreal
twists. The translator’s note that he found it difficult to translate “the
unguarded expressions of emotion and the direct discussion of truth,
beauty, and goodness” illustrates the root of Wei An’s power. And Bei
Dao’s “incisiveness of language” cuts painfully in Barbara Yien’s “The
White Terror” simile: “Efficient as the cleaner in a gangster / film who
wipes cerebrum / from linoleum, then vanishes.”

This issue of Manoa is fierce and luminous. The editors have assembled an
impressive collection that indeed names “the world anew” through language
and the quiet and exquisitely detailed portraits of the Lisu people by Luo
Dan. Even though he captures this ethnic minority in their rural
landscape, the photographs echo a moment in Lan Lan’s poem “Unfinished
Voyage,” in which she catalogues the daily sights and sounds of the city,
before arriving at the poem’s heart: “Before the window, / I’m thinking: I
love this world. There, / a fissure opens, my chance is here.” As I turned
the pages to face the Lisu–for example, the young man staring from the
middle of a blurred stream, his shoulders composed of angles of light–I
couldn’t help but feel a fissure open.
My chance to love this world is here.

Sky Lanterns: New Poetry from China, Formosa, and Beyond,ed. Frank Stewart
and Fiona Sze-Lorrain
(University of Hawaii Press, 2012)
Paperback, 155 pages, $20