Impossible Paradise: Selected Poems by Chen Yuhong, translated by George O'Connell and Diana Shi Poetry Book Society Translation Choice Spring 2026
Carcanet Press
Regarding the textures and substance of Chen Yuhong's poetry, the poet's urbane and cosmopolitan sensibilities expand its international reach. Her love for and knowledge of music - its instruments, terminology, and compositional forms - endow a richly metaphorical lexicon to conjure mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, tides of summer, spring, or fall. Similarly, her grasp of time's elasticity, its sliding scales, invests many of her poems. While her imagery might now deliver the concrete evocation and sensuality of physical existence, it may next glide over the threshold of transcendence, then return to earth. Chen's realms can also be alive with blossomings, flowers that punctuate or announce a season, their fragrance rich or evanescent, transient or perennial. In contrast to interminable summer heat or winter drizzle, the sudden caprice of fate or spirit may arrive with its own derangements. This poet acknowledges the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish. Her occasional inclination toward the surreal, say in the powerful litany 'May the Rain', draws strength from both the material plane and its interior or abstract refractions. As in the poem 'Longing', her images carry their force almost unmediated through the original to the translation.
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