Poetry Reviews

Poetry Reviews
“Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha: Enlightenment Poems from the ‘Theragatha’ and ‘Therigatha’”, translated by Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman
17 October 202017 October 2020
Having recently reviewed Matty Weingast’s attractive collection of poems from the Therigatha, I was somewhat surprised to see that Shambhala had decided to reissue an newly-expanded version of Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha (1996), given that the female half was already available in Weingast’s excellent and sensitively-handled new version. However, in addition…
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Poetry Reviews
“Burning Province: Poems” by Michael Prior
11 September 202015 September 2020
Michael Prior’s second poetry collection Burning Province opens with a stark image, one that speaks to the trauma and intergenerational memory that carries through the volume.
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Essays | Poetry Reviews
A Double Helping of Contemporary Chinese Poetry: Wu Sheng and Ya Shi
17 August 2020
Chinese remains inaccessible to most English-speakers; Chinese poetry doubly so, so Western readers should be grateful to Zephyr Press for issuing these two excellent bilingual versions of contemporary Chinese poetry, which introduce us to two unfamiliar and very different voices, Ya Shi from the mainland, and Wu Sheng from Taiwan.
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Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“Flèche”, poetry by Mary Jean Chan
21 June 2020
Interrogating the complexities of love, history and the power of naming through refreshing experimentation in language and form, Flèche—winner of 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry—is a significant and original contribution to Hong Kong poetry as well as to the current scene of British Asian diasporic voices.
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Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“A Nail the Evening Hangs On”, poetry by Monica Sok
18 June 202019 June 2020
Cambodian-American poet Monica Sok recalls transgeneration trauma in her debut collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On. Born in Pennsylvania to parents who have sought refuge in the United States, Sok retraces the contours of a difficult and important conversation on identity. She succeeds in using her Americanness to question her sense of belonging in…
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Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“Shahr-e Jaanaan: The City of the Beloved” by Adeeba Shahid Talukder
7 June 20207 June 2020
Adeeba Shahid Talukder, a translator of Persian and Urdu poetry into English, makes an audacious attempt to invoke the sensibility of the ghazal in her contemporary American verse. That a young, first-generation American writer can have such a feel for the ghazal is not a given, for the genre is full of traps, arising from…
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Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“A Dinner Party in The Home Counties” by Reshma Ruia
18 May 2020
Witty, energetic and uncompromising, the Indian-born, Manchester-based poet Reshma Ruia’s latest collection A Dinner Party in The Home Counties challenges contemporary social, racial and cultural divides. In this collection, the poet takes the reader on a vivid, multicultural journey filled with intriguing encounters and enigmatic characters.
Read More “A Dinner Party in The Home Counties” by Reshma Ruia
Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“States of the Body Produced by Love” by Nisha Ramayya
7 April 2020
The Tantra is an Indian esoteric doctrine of mysticism spanning Hinduism and Buddhism. It incorporates not just the spiritual but also the sexual ways of becoming one with the divine. While the Indian poets belonging to the devotional bhakti movement have written about the possibilities of the union with God with a hint of eroticism,…
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Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“Letters Home” by Jennifer Wong
2 April 20203 April 2020
“But what of returning?” The answer to that question is “not yet”, probably never for the long-term, although ambivalence and nostalgia prevails. The past, the cycle of life, life’s inevitable compromises, and that haunting question is deeply examined in this poetry collection by Jennifer Wong.
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Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“Saffron Jack” by Rishi Dastidar
28 March 2020
Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 short story “The Man Who Would Be King” (well-known thanks to the Sean Connery film by the same name) is about two English ex-army ruffians who want to become kings; they do indeed come to rule a kingdom in Afghanistan. Eventually, the two die when their “subjects” turn against them. Rishi Dastidar…
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Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems” by Abhay K
17 March 202017 March 2020
Indian poet-diplomat Abhay K is out with a larger collection of Indian poetry combining his earlier anthologies of a hundred poems each. The resulting book is The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems covering English poetry as well as English translations of poems written in 28 Indian languages.
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Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns” by Matty Weingast
13 March 202025 December 2020
“Dissatisfaction with the womanly rôle,” the psychologist Alfred Adler wrote in Understanding Human Nature (1927), “is … more evident among [women] who escape from life because of some so-called ‘higher reasons’. Nuns, or others who assume some occupation for which celibacy is an essential, are a case in point.” Adler, of course, was not judging…
Read More “The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns” by Matty Weingast
Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“My Mountain Country”, poetry by Ye Lijun, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
2 February 20208 February 2020
Visceral and enigmatic, Ye Lijun’s collection translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain reveals the intimate relationship between man and Nature. From home-brewed wine, Lake Huai to an intellectual’s return to her hometown, the poems in her first bilingual volume draw on the interaction between the environment and one’s internal states of being, reflecting on the seen and…
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Non-Fiction Reviews | Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry” by David Hinton & “The Selected Poems of Tu Fu”, translated by David Hinton
14 November 201914 November 2019
Serendipity, we may say, is a wonderful thing sometimes. Here are both a newly expanded edition of Hinton’s translation of Tu Fu’s poems, and at the same time his book about Tu Fu’s life as exemplified in an examination of some of these poems as they relate to the poet’s precipitous journey through life.
Read More “Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry” by David Hinton & “The Selected Poems of Tu Fu”, translated by David Hinton
Poetry Reviews | Reviews
“Paper-Thin Skin”, poetry by Aigerim Tazhi
8 August 201920 July 2021
Although Aigerim Tazhi is Kazakh, she writes in Russian. “I live in Kazakhstan,” she is quoted in translator J Kates’s introductory essay as saying, but I was born in the Soviet era. We had a common country then, a common capital (Moscow), and the main language was Russian. Therefore, in school we were taught…
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