Selected Poems

A bilingual (English & Chinese) collection by Dalian-based poet-editor, Mai Cheng. This is the first collection of his work to be made available in translation. [Mai Cheng] would seem to have no regard for the conventional limits of the poetic, but he rarely falls into a disorder that cannot be remedied. He has calmly but firmly placed the anvil of his poetic art in the space between saying too much and disclosing secrets, between the investigations of life and the cure of aesthetics, in order to forge his individual poetic voice. The risks he takes with language are managed with consummate ease. (Tang Xiaodu)

Mai Cheng (a pseudonym for Wang Qiang) was born in 1962 into a military family in the northen Chinese city of Shenyang. He also joined the army, and began to write poetry while still in uniform. In 1985, he met Gu Cheng (1956-1993), the well-known "Misty" poet who was later to commit suicide while in exile in New Zealand. Gu Cheng's work was to have a decisive influence on his poetic development, and Mai Cheng is now one of the core "Third-Generation Poets" who have risen to prominence in the wake of the "Misty" school. He lives in the north-eastern coastal city of Dalian where, faced with a modern, commercialised China, he says he feels himself to be a "spiritual orphan", although one for whom poetry is "the place to which I escape" and "the ultimate meaning of which is to make me a better man".