Concentric Circles

by Yang Lian, Brian Holton (Translator), Agnes Hung-chong Chan (Translator)

Yang Lian has written that Concentric Circles is 'the most important piece since I came out of China', and that it is emphatically not a political work, but instead a work focused on 'deep reality' and the nature of how humans understand that reality through the medium of language. The book, like its sections, uses a kind of collage, where many small fragments, each complete in itself, are aligned together in a series of patterns to form a grander mosaic: from line to line, poem to poem, cycle to cycle, in ever-widening concentric structures, 'to transform the diachronic life-experiences into the synchronic poetry'.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1999

About the author

Yang Lian (Chinese: 楊煉 Yáng Liàn; born 22 February 1955) is a Swiss-Chinese poet associated with the Misty Poets and also with the Searching for Roots school. He was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1955 and raised in Beijing, where he attended primary school.

His education was interrupted by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution after 1966. In 1974 he was sent to Changping county near Beijing to undergo 're-education through labor', where he undertook a variety of tasks including digging graves. In 1977, after the Cultural Revolution had ended and Mao Zedong had died, Yang returned to Beijing where he worked with the state broadcasting service.

Reviews

[Xavier Roelens · Rating 3 out of 5]

ik heb na het lezen van Non-Person Singular: Selected Poems of Yang Lian getwijfeld of ik deze ook nog zou lezen, maar het nawoord van de vertaler gaf me zin om het boek toch een kans te geven. Hij wees vooral op het experimentele karakter van de bundel en de reikwijdte. Hij gaat inderdaad van prozagedicht tot klank- en visuele poëzie. Het leven is nog altijd geen lachertje, maar de vele doodsbeelden zijn deze keer gegoten in gedichten met een duidelijke stuwing, met een energie die als tegengewicht werken en ook zin geven om door te lezen. Ook waren er veel meer beelden die me raakten.
Ik heb zeker niet door wat de overkoepelende gedachte van de bundel is. Maar inspirerend is hij wel.