Hong Kong Poems

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Hong Kong Poems, which consists of Chinese and English poems on facing
pages, is the result of a collaboration involving two poets and three
translators. The aim of the book is clearly laid out in its afterword:
“[to] express many of the sensations, fleeting ideas, moods, and
meditations that come from the astonishing and crucial history of Hong
Kong over the last twenty years.” The arrangement of the poems
opposite their translations is intended to create “a dialogue between
the two poets, with poem speaking to poem. ... This is the poetic
imagination in dialogue with two cultures, united in a third, Canada,
which is part of a global postculture.”

The poems—most no longer than a page—are written in the cryptic
Oriental style that Ezra Pound made his own before World War I, but lack
his subtlety and grace.