Hong Kong Poems
Hong Kong Poems
by Andrew Parkin and Laurence Wong
$14.95
- Spring 1997
- ISBN 978-0-921870-46-3 (0-921870-46-9)
- 6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback, 136 pages
- Poetry, Bilingual English & Chinese
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.”
Reviews:
“I am struck by the feel of the Asian in Parkin’s poems. They really are poems from Hong Kong. The two Mountain and Harbour poems are in startling contrast to one another. It’s a wonderful choice, the visual and mental enclosure bounded by mountain and harbour.”
—Murray Krieger, Irvine, California“Judging by Laurence Wong’s performance now, he is already the most prolific, most remarkable of native Hong Kong poets with the most wide-ranging vision. In the history of modern Chinese poetry since the May 4th Movement, he has a place that compels recognition.”
—Huang Weiliang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong
