Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry.

• Author: Allen, Joseph R.

Edited and translated by Michelle Yeh. New Haven: Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. lv + 245. $35.

Do NOT buy this book; wait until the paperback comes out, as certainly it soon should. Not that the hardbound edition is not worth the price--there is real breadth and quality here--but rather you will want copies of the softbound edition for your shelves, your classes, and your acquaintances who are friends of modem poetry.

Professor Yeh's volume will be central to any course on modern Chinese literature that also deals with the very difficult issues of poetry in twentieth-century China. It will perforce replace Hsu Kai-yu's out-of-date and out-of-print Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry (1963). Moreover, it supplements and is well supplemented by more restricted anthologies, such as Edward Morin's The Red Azalea (Hawaii, 1990), Donald Finkel's A Splintered Mirror (North Point, 1991), and Wai-lim Yip's Lyrics from Shelters (Garland, 1992). What these other volumes have in their strength of focus (especially Morin's) and gracefulness (especially Finkel's), Yeh's has in range. I expect that there will also soon be a twin Chinese-text volume that will make Yeh's work even more valuable. In the meantime a student can find most of the poems in Yang Mu's two-volume anthology, Xiandai Zhongguo shixuan (Taipei, 1989), to which Yeh refers in her "Note on the Translation" (p. li) (unfortunately there is no actual finding list for the poems).

But what is here? By my count, Yeh has included over 300 titles (some composed of multi-poem sequences and sets) by sixty-six poets from the earliest layers of the xinshi movement (Hu Shi's 1920 "Dreams and Poetry") to the very latest Newborn Generation poets from the Chinese mainland and the postmodernists from Taiwan; this makes for a truly wide and wonderful selection. Most poets are represented by four to six titles, with as many as ten for such early pillars as Xu Zhimo, Bian Zhilin, and Dai Wangshu. Of the contemporary poets, Yang Mu (Yeh's mentor) and Xia Yu have the most with eight poems each. I find the poetry of Xia Yu the most exciting of all the contemporary voices; her bizarre, twisted language shines through even the gooey layer that is translation. Here is a favorite, "Jiang Yuan":

She who gave birth to the first people

Was Jiang Yuan.

How did she give birth to the people?

She sacrificed and prayed.

whenever it rains

I feel

like copulating, propagating

descendants, spreading them

all over the...