Beating on Iron by Soo-Bok Kim and translated by Brother Anthony of Taize

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Beating on Iron by Soo-Bok Kim translated by Brother Anthony of Taize is published by Green Integer. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2017.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781557134301E12.

Beating on Iron, by Soo-Bok Kim and translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, has a title that feels percussive before it becomes descriptive. Iron suggests labor, hardness, industry, punishment, endurance. Beating on it suggests rhythm, protest, craft, and the stubborn refusal to let a material remain mute. In this Korean poetry collection, I would expect the emotional force to come from pressure placed on ordinary things until they begin to sound. Brother Anthony’s translation gives English-language readers access to a poet whose work may move between personal feeling and larger social resonance without announcing every turn. This seems like a book for readers who like poems with weight in the hand: not airy lyricism, but hammered music, repetition, and the dignity of difficult making.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.