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. He has noted the influence of Rilke; however, stylistically,
the book owes something to Surrealism, and philosophically to
Existentialism. The publication of the collection heralded a major new
talent.
Stylistically, nothing could be further removed from Luo Fu’s earlier
poetry. The book received immediate attention and comment from
poets and critics alike, eventually contributing to and culminating in
the Modernist debates of the 1960s and early 1970s. The poet Ya Xian
called the sequence a modern epic (Ya 1981a: 23). However, unlike a
conventional epic, which obeys certain literary principles in the treat-
ment of a culture’s great historic events and which functions as a
repository of cultural memory, Luo Fu’s sequence offers a far more
individualistic and idiosyncratic vision of history. The material for
Luo Fu’s “epic” is drawn from his own immediate life experience. The
first poem, the frame poem for the sequence, is representative:
Simply by chance I raised my
eyes toward the neighbouring
tunnel; / I was stunned
At dawn, that man rebelled
against death with his
naked body
Allowed a black tributary to
roar through his veins
I was stunned, my eyes swept
over the stone wall
Gouging out two channels of
blood on its surface
My face spreads like a tree, a
tree grown in fire
All is still, behind eyelids
only the pupils move
Move in a direction most
people fear to mention
And I am a bitter pear tree,
cut down
On my annual rings you can
still hear wind and cicadas
(Luo 1975: 39–40)
The frame poem begins with an oblique reference to the bombard-
ment of Quemoy, the nearness of death, and the genesis of the poem.
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