Lee Valley Poems

Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. "Lee Valley Poems" is his first book to be wholly conceived and written in London, once his place of exile and now his permanent home. It includes an extended sequence, "When Water Confirms", translated by Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-Chong Chan, and a suite of shorter poems translated by several poets, most of these working with Yang Lian: Polly Clark, Antony Dunn, Jacob Edmond, W.N. Herbert, Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson and Arthur Sze. The book's preface, A Wild Goose Speaks to me, takes as its springboard Yang Lian's comment 'There is no international, only different locals'. With this perspective, the Lee Valley of his first London poems becomes the international inside the local: the poet may travel far but never really leaves the ground of his own inner self, and the value and joy of poetry is seen as fishing in the deep sea of existence. This title is published in a dual language Chinese-English edition.