Landscape Over Zero

Escaping his native country after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Bei Dao currently teaches at the University of California at Davis. In his fourth collection, he continues his exploration of existential themes and political redresses in a distinctly frantic and compressed expressionistic style that is transposed onto the structure of traditional Chinese verse. In the original pictograms (which rely on vigorous nouns and verbs and forgo punctuation altogether), the poems could well be successful. But their translations in this bilingual edition they have not been fine-tuned to the nuances of English. Instead, they possess a raw and amateurish quality, as if they'd be penned by a highly emotional teenager (""gathering sobs look up/ scream out/ in their God's amnesia""). Bei Dao's own imagistic, surreal bent, however, contributes to the overall obliqueness (""hurry a lion into the cage of music/ hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse/ moving in parallel nights""). Fortunately, for patient readers, there are flashes of odd, ephemeral, stream-of-consciousness beauty (""night birds singing together/ you set smoke drifting free/ toward a place where song vanishes"") that almost redeem this unexpectedly awkward work. (Oct.)