Review – Impossible Paradise

Impossible Paradiseby Chen YuhongGenres: Poetry Pages: 152 Rating: Synopsis: One of Taiwan’s most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Glück, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time. Her award-winning translators, George O’Connell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons. In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhong’s finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish. I decided recently to try a bit more poetry in translation, and this collection of Chen Yuhong’s poetry, Impossible Paradise, is one of the picks that came out…