The August Sleepwalker - Softcover

`The August Sleepwalker' introduces the remarkable poetry of China's foremost younger poet, Bei Dao, one of the most gifted and controversial writers to emerge from the massive upheavals of modern China. His poetry reflects - and criticises - the conflicts of the `cultural revolution' of the late sixties and early seventies. His disillusion with the destructiveness of those times has made him an outsider, one of a group of underground poets who created an alternative literature to challenge the orthodoxies of the entire post-1949 period. Such poetry cannot avoid being engaged, if only by the absence of engagement where it is expected; like the other so-called `obscure' poets, he is experimental, subjective, apolitical and remains uncompromising in his allegiance to the imaginative values which his poetry advances and demonstrates.

Bonnie S. McDougall presents Bei Dao's collected poems in faithful, vivid translations, prefaced with an account of his work which both sets it in its Chinese context and examines its wider interest and appeal.