Time Magazine reviews a new book of poems by exiled poet Yang Lian, Lee Valley Poems
This collection — released last October in the U.K., but in the U.S. only last month — is a difficult but rich one, fully repaying the reader’s persistence. Divided into a section of short poems followed by a longer 25-part sequence, it is written in what Yang refers to as “the grammar of lunatics.” Read: dreamlike syntax and half-formed thoughts. Those lonely Tang dynasty poets may be Yang’s original blues brothers, but he’s as much a modernist and symbolist in the vein of Mallarmé or Rimbaud, whose famous “The Drunken Boat” is recalled in one poem. Chinese cultural images seep in, as when Yang likens the ripples of a river to splintered porcelain, or more clumsily mentions “chopsticks of rain.” But Yang is a poet, period, not a Chinese poet, and his work is rooted not in geography but his own imagination. “Apart from a line of poetry,” he writes, “we have nowhere to exist.”
To exist in Yang’s lines can be a gorgeous but frustrating adventure. “My mind is a starry sky,” he says in “The Journey.” It’s not a particularly inspired metaphor but an expansive one that hints at the world his work inhabits: a constellation of spectacular visions (“in your lungs/ a fatal heritage scatters snowflakes”) whose meanings are impossible to wholly understand. Each poem is instead propelled by the “pull of dreams.” Or nightmares: seagulls are nailed “like broken white crosses” to the sky and “water waves like a drowned hand.”
