Black Stars: Poems

(Paperback, Bilingual edition)

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Peace arrives with these beautiful poems. MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

A beautifully rendered translation by acclaimed American poet Martha Collins,Black Starsintroduces Vietnamese poet Ngo Tu Lap, who is both attached to his war-haunted childhood home and deeply conversant with contemporary global life.

Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future,Black Starsescapes the confines of time and space, suffusing image with memory, abstraction with meaning, and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translationsprinted alongside the original Vietnamesethe poems sing out with the kind of wisdom that comes to those who have lived through war, traveled far, and seen a great deal. While the past may evoke village life and the present a postmodern urban world, the poems often exhibit a dual consciousness that allows the poet to reside in both at once. From the universe to the self, we see Laps landscapes grow wider before they focus: black stars receding to dark stairways, infinity giving way to now. Laps universe is boundless, but also just big enough / To have four directions / With just enough wind, rain, and trouble to last.

Reviews

"Here is a writer who has seen the worst and written the best. His intensity comes from a gentle tone, and his spare beauty brings us insight sweetened by introspection... All that is ugly is redeemed by his descriptive writing, poetic restraint, and ennobling experience." --Washington Independent Review of Books "Reading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me--nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. The French called PTSD 'nostalgie.' I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems." --Maxine Hong Kingston "Underlying tensions animate these arresting poems by Ngo Tu Lap, movingly translated by Martha Collins and the author. Coinhabiting past and present, the speaker conflates absence and presence so that 'On the finger of a woman who died young / A ring still sparkles / In the depths of the black earth.' Inside this dual perspective, we, as readers, are enriched." --Arthur Sze

Author Bio

Ngo Tu Lap has published three collections of poetry in Vietnam, as well as five books of fiction, five books of essays, and many translations from Russian, French and English. He has won seven prizes for his writing, which has been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, Czech, and Thai. A fellow of the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies at Korea University in Seoul in 2010-2011, he is currently Dean of the Department of Social Sciences, Humanities and Economics at the International School (Vietnam National University, Hanoi). Martha Collins is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Blue Front and White Papers. She has also published two books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. Editor-at-large for FIELD and an editor for Oberlin College Press, Collins currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her seventh poetry collection, Day Unto Day, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2014.