Wild Geese Returning
Subtitle: Chinese Reversible Poems
Publisher: New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
Published: 2017
Language: eng; chi
Number of pages: 312
ISBN-13: 9789629968007
Subjects: Poetry (poetic works by one author)
Description: "The genre of poems that may be read both forward and backward, producing different creations was known as the "flight of wild geese." These poems were often sent so that a distant lover, like the migrating birds, would return. Its greatest practitioner, and the focus of this critical anthology, is Su Hui, a woman who, in the 4th Century, embroidered a silk for her distant husband using a grid of 840 characters that created perhaps 12,000 ways to read this poem. With examples from the 3rd to the 19th centuries, Michèle Métail describes reversible poems as "a singular adventure at the edge of meaning, of language, and of writing" --