John.B.Lee wrote the preface for my book, Thanks!
星期四 九月 30, 2010 8:41 am
Wings Towards Sunlight --Anna Yin
There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, “The water in the well does not disturb the water in the river.” If one might see the well as the still centre of inner life and the river as the ever-changing time-bound outer world, then one might see in this the nature of the human predicament as we strive to make connection between the life of the self and the life of the cosmos. In Anna Yin’s poems we find a yearning to reify the connection between that which is eternal and that which is ephemeral. These poems explore the nature of experience as it occurs in the ever present here and now and as it recurs in the contemplative life of the poet. They capture experience as it happens, linger in the moment, and render each moment in language that strives to hold on long enough to reveal and illuminate the meaning of primary experience. Here too we have memory, dream, and the transformative power of imagination. We have wish and wonder, echo and shadow. The poems give us a world where “sand is sand,” where east meets west, where Emily Dickinson meets Li Po, where the past communes with the present, the city is “involute” like a leaf, the contemporary poet strives to “depict snow/from a scientific point of view/ transparent and unique,” but embracing failure of that particular tyranny of the rational and analytic mind, she celebrates “whiteness/ whiteness and/whiteness that you leave behind.” In her poem, “Window and Mirror” she writes, “Window pleads to Mirror:/ ‘Let us ally.’ / I watch outside; / you look inside.” And in through this particular metaphor she explores the wonderful world and the wonderfilled “I” knowing that looking and seeing are not the same, and that listening and hearing are not the same. If one imagines “a door ajar/ in a waiting room” or a “…window, now open./ (where) winds blow through” one might imagine the vanishing of the disconnection, one might become “Li Po,/ dancing whith his white sleeves,” one might realize Emily Dickinson’s soul “ready to welcome the ecstatic experience” one might indeed “outlive” the puny hardships of human experience. As Anna Yin writes in the concluding words of her closing poem “…words settle as seeds,/ left to tell—”.
John B. Lee