Hawk of the Mind: Collected Poems (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)

Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. __Hawk of the Mind__ is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu’s poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet. Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. His poetic voice is subtle and lyrical, and his work is rich with precise images and crystalline thoughts invoking temporality and remembrance. A bold innovator and superb craftsman, he elegantly combines cosmopolitan experimentation with poetic forms and an allusive reverence for classical Chinese poetry while remaining rooted in his native Taiwan and its colonial history. Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu's poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators. It conveys the complexity and beauty of Yang Mu's work in a stately and lucid English poetic register that displays his ability to range from meditative to playful and colloquial to archaic. The volume includes an editor's introduction and definitive commentary that offer insights into the poet's major themes and motifs, explaining how he draws on deep engagement with Chinese and Western literary traditions, history, and art as well as mythology, philosophy, and music and a profound love for the natural world to create a nuanced and multifaceted artistic universe. It also contains translations of prefaces and afterwords written by Yang Mu for collections of his poetry. Hawk of the Mind demonstrates the breadth and depth of Yang Mu's oeuvre, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet. "The most comprehensive selection of poems by Yang Mu available in English. Translated by noted experts including John Balcom, Steve Bradbury and Andrea Lingenfelter, the volume also contains Yang Mu's prefaces and afterwords to four of his poetry collections, as well as his essay on the origins of Taiwanese poetry. All of this additional material shed light on his poetics. As a member of the first generation of postwar Taiwan, Yang Mu is a modern Taiwanese writer, whose poetry is known for its avant-garde, modernist cosmopolitanism, gracefully combining influences from the best international writing with a reverence for the legacy of classical Chinese poetry. The poems collected in this volume span a wide range of ideas and themes, including Yang Mu's references to music; his comments on social and political reality; his love for nature, and the re-examination of the colonial history of Taiwan. For more than half a century, Yang Mu has been a formative force and the most influential figure on Taiwan's poetry scene. He is widely read in the Chinese-speaking world and has been well received in other parts of the world. Individual volumes of his poetry are available in English, French, German, Japanese, and Swedish"-- Provided by publisher Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION Poems SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY TRANSLATORS