exile 165funereal moon a severed hand
flips back your days
back to the page where you are absent
you write and all the while
you relish your deletion
Like anyone else’s voice
bones crushed and spat in a corner just like that
the hollow voice of water on water
entering breath just like that
entering a pear without looking at anyone else
floor covered in skulls and each of them you
grown old overnight between the lines
as your poetry travels the world in hiding«The Book of Exile» sustains Yang Lian’s obsession with images of
death and the body—diseased, violated, mutilated, killed—in the fu-
nereal moon and the severed hand in the first stanza, and the bones
and skulls in the second. The poem doesn’t, however, explode with
physical disintegration and destruction, and it is much more contem-
plative than Yang’s other poems. In addition, even though its author’s
biography as part of recent Chinese history—or recent Chinese histo-
ry as part of its author’s biography—may bring June Fourth to mind,
this poem is not about June Fourth but about experiences of absence,
disappearance, emptiness, insignificance, removal, loneliness, conceal-
ment and exile, as its title announces.
These things emerge in scenes that are part of an imagined, surreal-
ized process of fruitless writing, throughout the first stanza and toward
the end of the second. Also, in the first line of the second stanza, the
voice, in a poem about writing, leads to association with recitation,
but without the unique qualities normally ascribed to individual per-
formance: like anyone else’s voice, instead. A vital—and, deadly—identi-
fication of you with the act of writing occurs. You is because you writes
and vice versa, and the absence or disappearance of the one means in-
capacitation or termination of the other at this moment, in the “here”
and now of exile (here... these strokes of the pen).^50 The severed hand that
flips back your days embodies an attempt to retrieve a past in which you
was present, and the act of writing could still mean that strokes of the
(^50) Cf Edmond & Chung 2006: 19.