Unlock

From Publishers Weekly
In America, exiled poet Bei Dao (a pen name) is the best-known member of the Misty School, a group of Chinese poets now in their 40s and 50s. In China, Bei Dao's American-influenced poems were thought to have helped inspire the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. (He has reportedly been often shortlisted for the Nobel Prize.) This fifth collection to be translated here presents more of the weird, breathless poems that are his signature, and owe as much to the thrifty paradoxes and mood lighting of Tom Waits's songs as to more standard voices of dissent. "The newspaper boy sets out in the morning/ all over town the sound of a desolate trumpet/ is it your bad omen or mine?" he writes in "Delivering Newspapers"; "Leaving Home" ends with the quatrain: "at night the wind steals bells/ the long-haired bride/ quivers like a bowstring/ over the body of the groom." Solo instruments in fact appear, like "crowds of strangers," in almost every poem, and readers will wonder whether the melancholy is better sustained in the original versions of the poems, since it often falls apart here. Translators Weinberger and Man-Cheong follow David Hinton's precedent with a (mainly) punctuation-free verse that accommodates Bei Dao's odder phrases ("authorized blizzard," "mint-flavored mailman"), but also calls attention to the botched getaways of many of the endings ("sound of the beginning/ color of the end" closes "Time and the Road"; "someone climbs a ladder/ out of sight from the audience" finishes "Deformation"). More annoying is the use of the continuous present to yoke poetic-seeming details together arbitrarily, which comes off as an intent to mystify, one that is not back up by the poems as presented. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Weekly Alibi, Amy DiBello, 14 December 2000
The impeccably constructed verses eventually yield a universe of intricate wonders populated with dazzling metaphors and shattering symbolism.


Pacific Reader, Andrea Lingenfelter, Spring 2001
I highly recommend this book.


Philadelphia Inquirer, Andre Ervin, 22 January 2001
[F]ew living writers possess a voice as elegant as that heard in Unlock.


Book Description
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.


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I highly recommend this book. Read all 6 "From The Critics" >


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