Ten Thousand Waves: Poems by Ping Wang

My rating: 5 of 5 stars





Ten Thousand Waves
Ping Wang

Since childhood, the poet Wang Ping has been aware of her own restless spirit. “I want to play,” she writes in her recent poetry collection, Ten Thousand Waves, “See the world before I become too old.”

Wang Ping’s wayward-seeking energy has transported her from the China of Mao’s Cultural Revolution across a myriad of geographies, cultures, and fantasies. Like a shaman, Ping dances, seamlessly assembling a layered collage of portraits, stories and dreams. She blends personal experience with conjured people, places, events, and reflections so honestly that we trust her flight from storytelling to poetic reportage, from fiction to fact.

Advancing on Ping’s often-guileful but compassionate voice, Ten Thousand Waves embraces the contradictions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the enigma of Tibet. She gives voice to the microcosms of life in a new China. She celebrates the simple contentment of a snail merchant and mourns the hope, hardship, and cruelty of immigrant lives in New York, the Metal City of Yongkang and on the murderous tidal flats of Wales.

Content drives her diverse stylistic choices. “I consider reading poetry to be a social obligation,” Ping says in one interview. “The small people are speaking,” she writes. “...and no dam of bullets or machine guns or pepper spray tanks media smears can stop this tsunami of justice and peace…this is not violence.”

Ten Thousand Waves plants images and impressions in the reader’s memory where they gestate, waiting to surface in unpredictable forms. Wang Ping’s poetry is the work of a mirthful, gentle trickster with an urgent and intricate agenda. In Ten Thousand Waves, her restless spirit follows the poet’s heart while her pen delivers the world to us.




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