Where the Sea Stands Still

Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s – most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether – Yang Lian has gone on to forge a mature and complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West. His poems can be disturbing and strange, haunted...