Nationalist retreat to Taiwan in the late-1940s, although explicit and
implicit censorship existed, creative writers including several poets
serving actively in the Nationalist navy wrote works that through their
critique of war engaged their government’s military policies. Ya Xian,
the subject of Steven Riep’s chapter, wrote eloquently of the impact of
battle on soldiers and civilians in an age when the government called
for patriotic, anticommunist propaganda. Ya Xian’s masterful use of
irony, his haunting imagery and his experiments with terminal and
circular structures set him apart as an antiwar poet par excellence.
This chapter examines Ya’s war poems, which Riep argues, should
also be read as a critique of war.
Another poet deeply affected by the specter of war was Luo Fu. In
his chapter on Luo, John Balcom illustrates how Luo’s first major
creative breakthrough as a poet came in 1958 when, as the shells rained
down overhead, he began writing inside a bomb shelter. His poetry can
be described as a vast canvas upon which the great themes of life,
death, love, and war are painted. Luo Fu’s reflections on the nature of
human existence and man’s fate in the modern world are expressed
through a complex array of personal symbols to create a stunning
and hermetic poetry of rich texture. His most recent collection entitled
Driftwoodis actually a 240-page epic poem, and Balcom has translated
it in its entirety.
In his chapter, Nick Kaldis ponders what he sees as an inherent con-
tradiction in nature writing in Taiwan. In his theoretical reflection on
this genre, he notes that the moment we convert an experience of
nature into discourse—poetic or otherwise—everything that is not
reducible to that discourse disappears from the original experience.
That is, the impenetrable otherness of nature cannot be made to appear
in written form, and even the noblest literary attempt to convey the
moment of a person’s immersion in that otherness risks colonizing
nature as a reductive concept within a rational-discursive format.
Treating Taiwan nature poetry as just another literary genre, therefore,
betrays the very thing the scholar is ostensibly venerating. Kaldis
explores the ways in which the contradictions inherent in the study of
nature writing have manifested themselves in academic experience, and
he suggests some ways of mediating these contradictions.
The final chapter in this section of the book, an examination of two
major contemporary Chinese women poets—Xia Yu from Taiwan and
Zhai Yongming from Sichuan—provides a corrective to the perception
the volume may have given thus far that most Chinese poets are men.
It also forms a convenient bridge between the first set of five chapters
and the second set, for unlike all other chapters, this one straddles the
4 Christopher Lupke