Nameless Flowers: Selected Poems of Gu Cheng - Softcover

Gu Cheng; Aaron Crippen; Hai Bo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080761548X ISBN 13: 9780807615485

Publisher: George Braziller Inc., 2005

Synopsis

Regarded as China's finest contemporary poet, Gu Cheng (1956-1993) has captivated readers worldwide.

While critics were calling him the harbinger of a troubled and new Obscure movement, the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution was taking his poems to heart. Nameless Flowers traces Gu Cheng's work from the lurid early lyrics that made him a literary star to the late expressions of dark beauty that predicted his second exile and tragic death. Though rooted in classical Chinese poetry, Gu Cheng's poems show traces of Western influences as diverse as Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, and entomologist Jean Henri Fabre. His poems embrace animate and inanimate beings from the vast Chinese masses and Mongolian plains to minuscule insects and pebbles. It is this simultaneous vision of the little man and the faceless mass that has made Gu Cheng one of China's most fervently loved poets.

Nameless Flowers includes memoirs by Gu Cheng and his father, writer Gu Gong, which vividly recount the poet's path out of rural exile to the Democracy Wall in Beijing and to the podiums of Berlin, London, and New York. Fans of writers such as Li Po, Basho, Hans Christian Andersen, Sylvia Plath, and Bei Dao, who was his friend, will readily recognize the powers of this eclectic and mystic poet.

About this title

About the Author:

Regarded as China's finest contemporary poet, Gu Cheng (1956-1993) has captivated readers worldwide.

Translator and poet Aaron Crippen lectured for six years at Shanghai International Studies University and Jilin University in Changchun, China. His translations of Gu Cheng's work received the American Translators Association Student Award in 2001.

Hai Bo, an artist living in Beijing, has exhibited at the 2001 Venice Biennale, the Arles Recontres de la Photographie in 2003, and the Max Protech Gallery in New York in 2004.

Review:

"Aaron Crippen has brought forth with keen poetic acuity and marvelous sympathy all the seasons of Gu Cheng's poetry. We can now experience in English the work of a major Chinese poet of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Here is a deep and imaginative dreamer who generously gave us his world."

About this edition

• Publisher: George Braziller Inc.
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 080761548X
• ISBN 13: 9780807615485
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 166