A Tower Built Downwards

"Yang Lian’s A Tower Built Downwards, impeccably transported from the Chinese by his long time translator Brian Holten, offers us a clear lens on the lived reality of a haunted world of exile and displacement. Yang Lian is a political exile since 1989; these are recent poems. Displacement is a central concern of contemporary poetry everywhere, so many of our poets are exiled, or migrants, or far from their homeland. The PEN Heaney Prize recognises the important conversations that take place across languages, it celebrates the radical understandings that poets can bring from one mother tongue into another, it acknowledges that English is an imperial language with deep roots in other languages and we are curious about other ways and means of saying. Steeped in classical Chinese poetry, with a spirited understanding of historical forces, Yang offers us elegy as a sublime art in a fallen world. An experimentalist, his adventures in his mother tongue are reflected in Brian Holten’s exciting use of English syntax and pronunciation to create a similar impact. Well if the books of poetry of last year are anything to go by we have entered a time of hybridity in poetry. Genre mash ups, novels in poem-clothing, texts for performance, multi-voiced poems, entertainments in typography, talking in tongues, riddling and rhyming, chanting and ranting, glossolalia and logorrhoea, all the inarticulate speech of the heart—the strategies are complex and varied. And through the whirligig the lyric power of one human voice breaking silence. One book you’re weeping, the next you’re laughing your head off. As always poetry, even at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, is singing our strange, complex, lives into language, with great verve and style. Browse our full selection of the best books of 2024 here"