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Enlarge Cover
list price: $14.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Mar 1997
ISBN:9780921870463
publisher:
Ronsdale Press
Description
Hong Kong Poems is the first-ever collection of poems about Hong Kong in parallel English and Chinese texts. Appearing in the year when Hong Kong returns to Chinese sovereignty, this collection offers insights into what Hong Kong was and is on the edge of becoming. Parkin and Wong speak of the dynamism of Hong Kong, of a city where the present meets the future. As well, they depict the "astronauts" with their families in Canada and their businesses in Hong Kong. They also evoke the feelings of the poor who are leaving the countryside for the dreams and hopes of magical Hong Kong. Many of the poems develop from within the Chinese poetic tradition of nature writing, while also recreating the troubled world of developers and their need of land for expansion. The juxtaposition of an English-Canadian poet and a Chinese-Canadian poet - with their poems in both English and Chinese - allows the reader to enter a dialogue about Asian modernity, a state of being that the Hong Kong critic Ackbar Abbas has called "postculture."
Contributor Notes
Andrew Parkin, born in 1937 in England, received his B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Cambridge. His Ph.D. in Drama is from Bristol University. He taught in a school in Hong Kong in the mid-sixties and then emigrated to Canada in 1970, teaching English at the University of British Columbia, as well as writing and publishing his poetry, mainly in Canada. He is a Canadian citizen and a member of the Canadian Writers' Union and P.E.N. Canada as well as the Hong Kong chapterof P.E.N. An honorary life member of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, he has published several academic books, numerous essays, and two books of poetry, Dancers in a Web and Yokohama Days, Kyoto Knights. His most recent book is an anthology of Hong Kong Chinese poetry in English, From the Bluest Part of the Harbour (O.U.P.). He returned to Hong Kong in 1991 to take up the Chair of English at the Chinese University, where he is a Fellow of Shaw College and University Orator. He is founder president of the Association for Canadian Studies in Hong Kong. Laurence Wong was born in 1946 in Hong Kong and received his B.A. in English and Translation as well as his M. Phil. in English from the University of Hong Kong. His Ph.D. is from the University of Toronto. His publications include eleven books of poetry, five collections of "lyrical essays," six collections of critical essays, one collection of essays on translation, and translations of Chinese, English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish poetry.
