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Overview
This bilingual edition, Six Vietnamese Poets, brings together for the first time the works of six writers who came to maturity during the American War in Vietnam, three men and three women. What will you find in this book?-the richness and diversity of Vietnamese life and literature from an array of poems that range from free verse to romantic lyric to traditional classic forms. The book features poets from North and South, men and women, combat soldiers and poet-soldiers writing of life in Vietnam through the last four decades of the 20th century.
Speaking to the Heart
After a long night up writing poems,
a streak of sunlight leapt into my room.
I ran to the yard,
running as if I were a child,
footprints breaking the earth's first dew,
chest brushing softly the short grass.
Earth and sky seeped into me like wine.
Startled,
I saw my heart in the shape of a ploughshare
resting on the earth's shoulder,
the heart thumping, steadily ploughing into time.
-Lam Thi My Da
Synopsis
This bilingual edition, Six Vietnamese Poets, brings together for the first time the works of six writers who came to maturity during the American War in Vietnam, three men and three women. What will you find in this book?-the richness and diversity of Vietnamese life and literature from an array of poems that range from free verse to romantic lyric to traditional classic forms. The book features poets from North and South, men and women, combat soldiers and poet-soldiers writing of life in Vietnam through the last four decades of the 20th century.
Speaking to the Heart
After a long night up writing poems,a streak of sunlight leapt into my room.
I ran to the yard,
running as if I were a child,
footprints breaking the earth's first dew,
chest brushing softly the short grass.
Earth and sky seeped into me like wine.
Startled,
I saw my heart in the shape of a ploughshare
resting on the earth's shoulder,
the heart thumping, steadily ploughing into time.
-Lam Thi My Da
Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung co-translated Distant Road by Nguyen Duy. Bowen is also the author of two books of poetry, Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison and Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong. They both live in Boston.
Publishers Weekly
"How crowded the city a war has just passed through. Streets with ruined houses, whole blocks devastated, ...now roads widened, trees planted, new train station, new flower basin in the garden, ...multicolored shirts and dresses, the carefree, the loudspeakers blaring out new songs." So poet Y Nhi describes a postwar cityscape in Vietnam. She's one of the writers anthologized in Six Vietnamese Poets., edited by poet Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen, director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The volume also showcases the work of Nguyen Khoa Diem, Lam Thi My Da, Nguyen Duc Mau, Xuan Quynh and Pham Tien Duat, all of whom came of age during the American war and offer scenes of Vietnamese life in the last 40 years. (Apr.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.