Welcome to Chinese poetry - June 2005

January 18, 2006 However, he is close to Song in his ‘no frills’ approach to language. There is no ‘flourish’ in his poetry, and no particular need to do imaginative things with language. His primary focus seems to be experience: he has been around and thought things that struck him as significant and he wants you to know about them without any beating round the bush on his part. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the kinds of experiences he is trying to express are not usually dealt with. They can be paradoxical, or shocking, or so ordinary that they verge on the invisible for many of us. With refreshing candour, they also renounce clear-cut moral standards in a way that works positively: life is an experiment and, as Jin writes in his ‘21 Maxims’, the only real rule of thumb for living is “whether or not you’ve been annihilated” . . .

Just to give you some background on Jin Haishu, he was born in Shanghai in 1961, but did most of his growing up in Fujian province. In 1982, he graduated from Xiamen University with a major in Philosophy, picking up a second language (Japanese) along the way. Apart from assorted poems, he has published in a way range of genres. His main works include Deep Anxiety [Shendu jiaolü] (short stories), The Orphan Zhao [Zhaoshi gu’er] (novel) and a play based on this novel that was short-listed for the 2004 Cao Yu Drama Prize. He has also translated the work of Nobel-prize winning Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata into Chinese. He currently lives in Beijing.