Unlock

By Bei Dao

Book Overview

New poetry by the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet-in-exile. Bei Dao, the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet, has been the poetic conscience of the dissident movements in his country for over twenty years. He has been in exile since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Unlock presents forty-nine new poems written in the United States, and may well be Bei Dao's most powerful work to date. Complex, full of startling and sometimes surreal imagery, sudden transitions, and oblique political references, and often embedding bits of bureaucratic speech and unexpected slang, his poetry has been compared to that of Paul Celan and Cesar Vallejo: poets who invented a new poetry and a new language in the attempt to speak of the enormity of their times. The sixth book of Bei Dao's work published by New Directions, Unlock has been translated by Eliot Weinberger, the distinguished essayist and critically acclaimed translator of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, in collaboration with the historian Iona Man-Cheong and the poet himself.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811214478
• ISBN13: 9780811214476
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 113 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

exile, yes, beautiful & necessary exile

the book, also, never mentions barbed wire but makes barbed wire come to mind. Bei Dao's writing is some of the most pressing, urgent poetry I have ever read. The man is a great poetic genius. With lines about such things as the wind closing its iron fist, Bei Dao speaks with power & elegance against repression & of the absolute importance of the individual. This book is very important. Bei Dao has made himself a significant man. Context of human value. According to Jonathan Spence from the New York Times Book Review, Bei Dao "was obliged to create a new poetic idiom that was simultaneously a protective camouflage and an appropriate vehicle for 'unreality.'" According to highly respected poet Robert Hass, "[A Bei Dao poem] feels as if it follows the pulse of consciousness, as it moves from metaphor to metaphor, thought to thought, something like a pilot light turned down to the jets and flickers of a single, intense, blue flame." Something else that's nice about this book is that it's bilingual, & Bei Dao was active in the translation process.

The Poetry of Exile

This is a wonderful collection of Bei Dao's most recent works. What I love most about his poetry is the way it grapples with language in a way that is not quite surreal but not concrete either. Many of the poems are self reflective in that they ponder what it means to be a poet writing and thinking in a language that is not the same as the places of his "exile" (Western Europe and the United States). Although, in my opinion, the book of poetry prior to this collection, called Old Snow, is an even stronger statement on these issues. You can tell from the poetry that the current political situation of China, and an alienation are still fresh in Bei Dao's mind (I have talked briefly with Bei Dao about some of these issues). I have no doubt that he will find a place as one of the great poets of the modern age.