The Terracotta Army

In 1985, Gary Geddes won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region, for The Terracotta Army, a brilliant sequence of his Chinese sonnets. The nine-couplet poems were inspired by his 1981 visit to the archaeological site in China where more than 8,000 individually sculpted, life-sized soldiers and horses were interred in the third century to accompany Emperor Ch'in Shi Huang Di into the afterlife.

In this ideologically charged volume, Geddes gives voice to a few soldiers, who engage in ...