through a deeply personal, anxious, and imaginative worldview. Such
writing deliberately ignores boundaries—generic or other—between,
in this first excerpt, daydream, autobiography, and reconstruction of
an idealized rustic past when modernization had not disrupted the
harmonious coexistence of society and nature in rural Taiwan:
Current of the ocean, island of the continent.... Please give me back a small station where but one train stops
daily, a lone gravel road where the quail and her chicks softly pass at
dawn. My home is by the not-too-distant graveyard, by the temple
square where spikes of rice are spread to dry... my father the grade-
school teacher, holding a fishing pole, forever ambling by. (K. Liu 2004a:
122–123)^20
This autobiographical prose poem, which begins with the speaker’s
memories of his ageing, terminally ill father taking a train to visit him
(in Taipei), is notable for its prayer-like plea, soliciting ageless land
and sea to restore an earlier historical stage in the speaker’s life and in
Taiwan’s modernization. It is one of Liu’s less overtly ecological
poems, yet it aptly represents the subtlety of his poetic imagination as
it condenses numerous elements that are all in some way connected to
the loss of a more pristine relationship between man and nature. The
speaker longs to arrest and reverse development, for the sake of a mul-
tilayered personal memory that is at once bucolic and natural, where
the comings and goings of wild creatures and a barely industrialized
society take place against the backdrop of agricultural, religious, and
mortuary settings, the human cycles of life and death. There is a deep
melancholy at the heart of this poem, a sense of loss that indirectly
associates the processes of advanced (“21st century”) development
with the loss of the father, yearning for a time when nature, agricul-
tural village, and family coexisted in health and harmony, even accept-
ing and incorporating an earlier stage of modernization—the lone
train—into that happy memory. This last inclusion is key to the piece,
for Liu acknowledges but rarely laments or protests against the devel-
opmental processes. Here he simply allows readers to overhear his
impossible plea to the elements, prompting us to make associations
with our own nostalgic desires concerning similar developments in our
own lives. In the process, the poem precipitates anxiety over those
cherished natural features of our current lives that may soon be lost to
further social and industrial encroachment.
The lack of angry outbursts is notable in many of Liu’s poems and
essays that observe ecological devastation. Rarely taking a self-righteous
or castigatory tone, his work consistently embodies an acknowledgment
92 Nick Kaldis