Böcker av Bei Dao

Sidetracks, Bei DaoâEUR(TM)s first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poetâEUR(TM)s first long poem and his magnum opusâEUR"the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language.

Sidetracks, Bei Dao's first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet's first long poem and his magnum opus-the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. "As a poet, I am always lost," Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet's wandering life-from his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the years of exile living in six countries, back to the rural construction site where he worked during the Cultural Revolution, to the "sunshine tablecloth" in his kitchen in Davis, California, and his emotional visit home after a thirteen-year separation ("the mother tongue has deepened my foreignness"). All the various currents of our times rush into his lifelines, reconfigured through the "vortex of experience" and the poet's encounters with friends and strangers, artists and ghosts, as he moves from place to place, unable to return home. As the poet Michael Palmer has noted, "Bei Dao's work, in its rapid transitions, abrupt juxtapositions, and frequent recurrence to open syntax evokes the un-speakability of the exile's condition. It is a poetry of explosive convergences, of submersions and unfixed boundaries, 'amid languages.'"

in the mirror there is always this momentthis moment leads to the door of rebirththe door opens to the seathe rose of time             -Bei DaoThe Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems presents a glowing selection of poetry by contemporary China's most celebrated poet, Bei Dao. From his earliest work, Bei Dao developed a wholly original poetic language composed of mysterious and arresting images tuned to a distinctive musical key. This collection spans Bei Dao's entire writing life, from his first book to appear in English, The August Sleepwalker, published a year after the Tiananmen tragedy, to the increasingly interior and complex poems of Landscape Over Zero and Unlock, to new never-before-published work. This bilingual edition also includes a prefatory note by the poet, and a brief afterword by the editor Eliot Weinberger. A must-read book from a seminal poet who has been translated into over thirty languages.

A second bilingual collection since the author's enforced exile from China in 1989.