Böcker av Yang Lian

A Tower Built Downwards is the latest instalment of poetry from one of the most innovative and influential poets from China. Before and since his enforced exile from 1989, Yang Lian has been widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. The different sections - short poems, sequences, and one long poem - form a single comprehensive statement of Yang's recent explorations. It is rooted in his living experience of the historical retrogression of Hong Kong, the disaster of Covid-19, the global spiritual crisis, as well as his personal sadness at events such as his father's death. Yang Lian's work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. This edition of A Tower Built Downwards contains the full, unabridged collection, including poems that were removed for its publication in China.

"This is large poetry, deep poetry, poetry that concerns itself with the great human themes. This is poetry that can change your life." -Brian Holton

Since the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s, Yang Lian has forged complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

"Lee Valley Poems" was Yang Lian's first book to be wholly conceived and written in London, once his place of exile and then 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 seven fellow poets.

Before and since his enforced exile Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Concentric Circles is a work focused on 'deep reality' and the nature of how humans understand that reality through the medium of language. Here fragments are aligned in patterns from poem to poem in ever-widening concentric structures.