Fly Heads and Bird Claws by Leung Ping-kwan and translated by Brian Holton, John Minford

This is poetry from China.

Fly Heads and Bird Claws by Leung Ping-kwan translated by Brian Holton, John Minford is published by MCCM Creations. This is a Book originally written in Chinese. This was published in 2013.0 and has the ISBN of 9.789881521781E12.

Fly Heads and Bird Claws, by Leung Ping-kwan and translated by Brian Holton, John Minford from Chinese, brings Chinese-language poetry from China into English through Leung Ping-kwan’s Hong Kong and Chinese sensory intelligence, creaturely detail, and urban appetite. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for flies, birds, city, and the quick little violences of looking closely at daily life, not as a fixed lesson about China. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Fly Heads and Bird Claws belongs in the translated poetry library because it gives Chinese-language poetry a Hong Kong-inflected field of food, object, and street attention.

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.