wikipedia | MCLC |

Winner of the 2013 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.

“Yang Mu,” Michelle Yeh comments, “is an innovator, a supreme craftsman. His deep engagement in world literature, cultures, and history has given his work a versatility and profundity that is unparalleled among Chinese poets today, perhaps even in the entire history of modern Chinese poetry. He has created a language that is densely lyrical and charged with a diction that runs the spectrum from the colloquial to the archaic, a syntax that is supple and complex, and a tone that ranges from playfulness to passion, and to despair. He moves easily from the world of tangibles to the world of abstraction, with images rich and precise. His poetic world is cosmopolitan and global on the one hand, and decidedly native and local on the other. Some of his most powerful poems reveal an unwavering love for and identity with Taiwan. Yang Mu has inspired several generations of poets in the Chinese-speaking world. He has produced a body of work brilliant and impressive in its range: reticent, controlled, yet musical, adventuresome, and linguistically surprising line-by-line. The reader thinks with him, inside the poem and inside his mind and emotions, and emerges more aware of the world and what it means to be human.”