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Yang Lian was one of the original Misty Poets who reacted against the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. Born in Switzerland, the son of a diplomat, he grew up in Beijing and began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return he joined the influential literary magazine Jintian (Today). His work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. He was a Chinese poet in exile from 1989 to 1995, finally settling in London in 1997. He now lives in Berlin. Translations of his poetry include four collections with Bloodaxe, Where the Sea Stands Still (1999), Concentric Circles (2005), Lee Valley Poems (2009) and Narrative Poem (2017), as well as his long poem Yi (Green Integer, USA, 2002), Anniversary Snow (Shearsman, 2019), and Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections (Shearsman, 2008), a compilation of earlier work. He is co-editor with W.N. Herbert of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), and was awarded the International Nonino Prize in 2012. Both Where the Sea Stands Still and Narrative Poem are Poetry Book Society Recommended Translations.
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)
