Taiwan Strait. Andrea Lingenfelter’s discussion of these two important
woman poets who are only a year apart in age raises an interesting
question: Is it necessarily the case that poetry written by women
feature themes of women? While it may not be possible to provide a
conclusive answer to that question, Lingenfelter shows through a dis-
cussion of an array of poems by Xia and Zhai how issues of sexuality,
marriage, and social acceptance are important themes that weigh in
their respective consciousnesses. She also demonstrates how to one
extent or another each poet engages her past, incorporating into her
own creative work both cultural and discursive elements of traditional
Chinese society with respect to women, in some cases creating an
internal polemic and in others appropriating the mythic imagery of
ancient China as a way of revivifying Chinese language in the present.
Contemporary Poets of Mainland China
The second portion of the book focuses on PRC poets and develop-
ments related to them in the most recent times in China. Yibing Huang
observes in his chapter that Gu Cheng’s position in contemporary
Chinese poetry constitutes an ultimate mystery. Despite his early
recognition and success, somehow Gu Cheng has never been accepted
as a fully mature poet. He was labeled as a “poet of fairy-tales,” which
seemed a curse instead of a blessing. While in his early lyric poetry Gu
Cheng yearns to “walk over the world,” in his late poetry he longs to
return to the “city,”—a “city” to which he was native and a “city”
that serves as his last mental refuge. Eventually, this “child” is any-
thing but “innocent” and the “nature” is anything but “natural”; and
what was born is neither a poetry of “innocence” nor a poetry of
“experience,” but a “ghost” poetry. This transformation or metamor-
phosis from “willful child” to “wandering ghost” and the return from
“nature” to “city” forms the essence of Huang’s treatment of Gu
Cheng’s poetry.
Reading Yan Li’s recent poetry, including in particular his
“Polyhedral Mirror,” Paul Manfredi’s chapter depicts the shifts in Yan
Li’s nature imagery over the past fifteen years. He situates this evolu-
tion in terms of Yan’s own locale, namely residence in major urban
centers in the United States, (greater) China, and Australia over the
same period of time. He concludes that the increasing consciousness of
a degraded natural global environment held by people worldwide is
working its way into the otherwise rather unevironmentally conscious
world of Yan Li’s poetic and artistic work. Yan’s growing environmental
Introduction 5