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Rating:
Summary: exile, yes, beautiful & necessary exile
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Poetry of Exile
Review: 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.