Winner of the 2020 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation
Published 2019. Paperback, 156pp, 8x8ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848616707 [Download a sample PDF from this volume here ]. English language only.

"If Yang Lian is new to you, I hope it spurs you on to read more of this extraordinary poet. If you have read him before, then you will find familiar themes here: the search for a mature wisdom, the need to readjust the balance between modernism and the classical heritage, the impossibility of giving easy solutions to the problem of evil and suffering in this world. There is also a new sense of his coming to terms with the devastating loss of his mother when he was a teenager, which is when he began writing poetry, as well as intimate and tenderly-voiced declarations of the power of love in its many forms. There is, too, a growing sense of poetry as a weapon in the fight to heal this planet of ours, so wounded by greed, war, exploitation and plunder.

This is large poetry, deep poetry, poetry that concerns itself with the great human themes. This is poetry that can change your life." (Brian Holton)

Comments on Yang’s previous publications include:

“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 […] Yang Lian’s work is rooted not in geography but in his own imagination […] to exist in Yang’s lines can be a gorgeous but frustrating adventure.” —Tim Kindseth, Time Magazine

“In Narrative Poem , Yang Lian turns his first-hand experiences of these man-made catastrophes […] into a radically strange montage. Narrative Poem would read as elegiac except that we are repeatedly made to regard that mode as premature […] This is what Yang Lian calls a ‘poem’s affront’. Harm does its thing—and if it then doubles back to do it again, so too must poetry. Both will get there at the same time.” —Nan Z. Da, Times Literary Supplement

“Yang Lian is one of the most ambitious poets writing in Chinese today—indeed, one of the most ambitious poets writing in any language… Narrative Poem represents a stunning achievement of both poet and translator, bringing the two together almost as one.” —Lucas Klein, Translation and Literature

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