Kirkus Reviews QR Code
NEW GENERATION by Wang Ping

NEW GENERATION

Poems from China Today

edited by Wang Ping & translated by Elizabeth Fox

Pub Date: July 19th, 1999
ISBN: 1-882413-55-5

paper 1-882413-54-7 NEW GENERATION ($25.00; paper $16.00; Jul. 19; 236 pp.; 1-882413-55-5; paper 1-882413-54-7): The Shanghai-born editor, who left China for the US in 1985, gathers together 24 young poets, all born in the “50s and “60s most still living and sometimes managing to publish under the current repressive regime. Writing in the shadow of the Tiananmen Square uprising, these avant-garde writers reject the poetic ideals of their predecessors, the so-called “Misty poets,” who themselves rejected the social realism of Maoism in favor of conventional romanticism. Poet after poet in this vital anthology goes beyond notions of truth and beauty for the grittier realities of everyday life; darkness pervades the experimental forms here, though the poets lack the cynicism of their Western counterparts. Many of these plain-speaking writers struggle with language itself and its relation to objects and silence. The very readable translations, supervised by Ping (who worked with numerous American poets), provide a real sense of the variety of subjects, and each poet is represented with a sample poem in the original, ranging from the confessional verse of Jia Wei about abortions and excrement to Xue Di’s scream of exile, with powerful poetic manifestoes from Liu Manliu and Yu Jian as well.