Zhongguo

Roger Nash is a philosophy professor at Laurentian University and the
author of Night Flying.

David Lawson’s fourth collection of poems seeks to distil the
experiences and insights he gained in four years as a visiting professor
in China. One of the book’s strongest poems, “Human Ties,” speaks
of the poet’s distress at finding the corpse of a household cat left
for days at the curb. Lawson moves to sympathetic cultural criticism in
“Mozart in Wuhan,” which juxtaposes ancient Yangtze river and
traditional markets with the technologies of giant derricks and
loudspeakers playing Mozart. In “Mao at McDonalds,” the surreal
picture of a McDonald’s by the Forbidden City is explored (a Mao
lookalike orders a Big Mac).

The collection ends with three cycles of poems on Shaanxi tomb sites.
The need to provide sufficient historical context for the Western reader
gives the “historical” poems a sense of having been assembled from
guidebooks. However, there are some striking and successful poems in the
cycles: a complex cameo of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, in his last days,
shows him losing his belief in immortality and venting his frustration
in wholesale executions.