The latest book by the Sarah Maguire Prize-winning poet and translator Brian Holton, Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds is a collection of Scots translations of poetry by Li Bai and Du Fu, two of the most renowned poets of Ancient China. By bringing two of the world's great poets - from the oldest continuous literary tradition in the world - into the library of Scots writing, Brian Holton creates a text as valuable in its own way to the literary tradition as Lorimer's wonderful 'New Testament in Scots'. Published in stunning hardback with calligraphy by Chinese artist Chi Zhang, Hard Roads an Cauld Hairst Winds was the beneficiary of a Scottish Book Trust Scots Publication Grant.

Brian Holton is unique in that he can translate directly into Scots from the Chinese. This anthology consists of translations into Scots and English of the first sixty poems of the standard anthology Song Ci Sanbaishou("300 Song Dynasty Song Lyrics"), edited by Zhu Zumou (1924), with a Translator's Afterword/Owresetter's Eftirword. In China, the "300 Song Ci" is the standard anthology for high school and undergraduate students. This book introduces Scots (and English) speakers to one of the major genres of Chinese lyric verse. This genre appeared in the ninth century, during the late Tang Dynasty, but is generally considered to have reached its full flowering in the following Song Dynasty (960-1279CE). Among the most elegant and beautiful texts written in any language, these lyrics are of particular interest in that they demonstrate the multum in parvo (less is mair) principle: like Chinese calligraphy or landscape painting, great and subtle effects result from a high artfulness that looks artless. The two main schools of Song Ci are the heroic (haofang) and the delicately restrained (wanyue). They are also technically interesting, each being written to the irregular metrical structure of one of a selection of 800-odd models, each of which was derived from an existing song form, often from Central Asia. The authors include masters such as Fan Zhongyan (989-1052), Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), Liu Yong (987-1053), and Yan Jidao (1031-1106), as well as lesser-known writers.

This anthology is the record of a revolution in Chinese poetry. As the Cultural Revolution gave way to the post-Mao era - years of political turmoil, economic boom and the return of Hong Kong - the present period has been one of extraordinary and deeply problematic growth. Chinese poets, driven by alienation, trauma and exile, have responded with one of the most thorough and exciting experiments in world poetry. Jade Ladder shows authoritatively for the first time in English the diversity of Chinese poetry as it renegotiates its relationship with Western modernist and postmodernist poetry, and re-engages with its Classical heritage. Misty, post-Misty, Fourth Generation; publication in samizdat, publication in exile, publication on the internet - in a nation of billions, it sometimes seems that there are a million ways to write poetry. This selection provides a concise series of perspectives on a proliferating scene. It focusses on key figures and key poems. It moves beyond the lyric to showcase an astonishing diversity of genres including narrative poetry, neo-Classical writing, the sequence, experimental poetry and the long poem. Through detailed introductions, it examines how contemporary poetry grew from both the fertile Classical tradition and the stony ground of the Communist period, only to rewrite that tradition, and resist that regime. Jade Ladder is the most comprehensive single volume guide to what has been happening and what is happening now in a culture of undeniably global significance. It is indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the future not just of China, but of poetry.

Before and since his enforced exile from 1989, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets from China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. A Tower Built Downwards is the latest instalment of his poetry, written between 2019 and 2021. The different sections - short poems, sequences, and one long poem - form a single comprehensive statement of Yang's recent explorations. It is rooted in his living experience of the historical retrogression of Hong Kong, the disaster of Covid-19, the global spiritual crisis, as well as his personal sadness at events such as his father's death. The creativity of the writing faces - is even excited by - the depth of the challenges of reality. The long title-poem in seven parts is a spiritual journey travelling back in time, completed back in the now, building up into 'a reincarnation within one', as endless time is transformed into multilayered poetical space, in Ai Weiwei's words: 'This intellectual tower... [turns] the unsurpassable puzzles intermingled with life and death into an in-depth exploration of human emotion.' Ai Weiwei's innovative cover image featuring CCTV cameras and chains made of gold stretches around the whole book, across French flaps and then continues inside the front and back covers of the book, becoming an extraordinary metaphor for the book's content.

Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s - most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether - Yang Lian has gone on to forge a mature and complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West. His poems can be disturbing and strange, haunted as they are by the eerie ordinariness of life and death. But in the end it is a triumphant poetry, wholly engaged with the struggle to be alert to life, wholly engaged in the daily renewal, the search for that 'shore / where we see ourselves set sail'. All the poems are presented in English and Chinese. Brian Holton also includes a fascinating memoir on translating Yang Lian as well as one sequence translated into Scots. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. Yang Lian has written that Concentric Circles is 'the most important piece since I came out from China', and that it is emphatically not a political work, but instead a work focused on 'deep reality' and the nature of how humans understand that reality through the medium of language. The book, like the sections of which it is comprised, uses a kind of collage, where many small fragments, each complete in itself, are aligned together in a series of patterns to form a grander mosaic: from line to line, poem to poem, cycle to cycle, in ever-widening concentric structures. Yang Lian regards this English version as an integral part of the work as a whole - indeed, it could be said that the work is incomplete without its English parallel, and that as he reads it he is 'struggling free from time and incorporated into the beautiful "concentric circles" of ancient and modern poetry, in China or elsewhere'.

Dual language Chinese-English edition translated by Brian Holton. Before and since his enforced exile from 1989, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. Narrative Poem, Yang Lian's most personal work to date, is built around a series of family photographs, the first of which was taken on the day when he was born, on 22 February 1955, and the last of which dates from the time he spent undergoing 're-education through labour' - and digging graves - during the mid-1970s. The poetry ranges backward and forward in time, covering his childhood and youth, his first period of exile in New Zealand, and his subsequent adventures and travels in and around Europe and elsewhere. In 'this unseen structure written by a ghost' Yang Lian weaves together lived experience with meditations on time, consciousness, history, language, memory and desire, in a search for new/old ways of speaking, thinking and living. Narrative Poem, or (Xushishi), was published in China in 2011, and this bilingual edition presents the Chinese text alongside Brian Holton's masterly translation of a technically complex work of great beauty, The book also includes Family Tradition, Yang Lian's first ever preface to his own work, and Ghost Composer/Ghost Translator, a translator's afterword by Brian Holton. 'Trees that desire silence but cannot be silent will murmur at their lack of Samadhibala, the meditator's gentle strength of will. At the same time, the winds of Family Tradition will not cease blowing. I believe they never will.' - Yang Lian (in Family Tradition). Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. "Lee Valley Poems" is his first book to be wholly conceived and written in London, once his place of exile and now his permanent home. It includes an extended sequence, "When Water Confirms", translated by Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-Chong Chan, and a suite of shorter poems translated by several poets, most of these working with Yang Lian: Polly Clark, Antony Dunn, Jacob Edmond, W.N. Herbert, Pascale Petit, Fiona Sampson and Arthur Sze. The book's preface, A Wild Goose Speaks to me, takes as its springboard Yang Lian's comment 'There is no international, only different locals'. With this perspective, the Lee Valley of his first London poems becomes the international inside the local: the poet may travel far but never really leaves the ground of his own inner self, and the value and joy of poetry is seen as fishing in the deep sea of existence. This title is published in a dual language Chinese-English edition.

"If Yang Lian is new to you, I hope it spurs you on to read more of this extraordinary poet. If you have read him before, then you will find familiar themes here: the search for a mature wisdom, the need to readjust the balance between modernism and the classical heritage, the impossibility of giving easy solutions to the problem of evil and suffering in this world. There is also a new sense of his coming to terms with the devastating loss of his mother when he was a teenager, which is when he began writing poetry, as well as intimate and tenderly-voiced declarations of the power of love in its many forms. There is, too, a growing sense of poetry as a weapon in the fight to heal this planet of ours, so wounded by greed, war, exploitation and plunder. This is large poetry, deep poetry, poetry that concerns itself with the great human themes. This is poetry that can change your life." -Brian Holton, from the Afterword to this volume

Riding Pisces brings together a number of hard-to-find and uncollected texts from almost the full extent of Yang Lian's career: from Masks and Crocodiles (Sydney, 1990-although the translations here are new), from the out-of-print collection Non-Person Singular (London, 1994), from Notes of a Blissful Ghost, (Hong Kong, 2002), from the Sailor's Home six-handed anthology (Shearsman Books, 2005), and from the as-yet-uncollected Dark Blue Verses.

Staunin Ma Lane isn't intended to be a comprehensive tour of classical [Chinese] poetry, though it does contain specimens of many of the major genres and styles, and it may serve as a --first primer. Note that the poetry is in the Scots: the English versions are there to help the non-Scots speaker. It has been my aim to make poems in Scots: if you expect to --find dictionary definitions of Chinese words in my translations, you will be disappointed. That sort of drably mechanical 'accuracy' does not make poetry, and a poem that doesn't move the reader is like a joke that isn't funny. In the translation of poetry, there are many, many more ways of being wrong than of being right, and I do not claim that my versions are in any way de--finitive or better than anyone else's: I do, however, want to say to the reader, "Deek whit the Mither Tongue can dae: gin it can dae this, whit'll it no can dae?" (Look what our mother tongue can do: if it can do this, what will it not do?), and I would urge readers inclined toward translation to do it for themselves, whatever their mother tongue might be.

In 2012, Yang Lian and others started an online poetry competition in China. They expected a good response, but were astounded to receive more than 85,000 entries, with unknown poets-some earning their living as migrant workers-delivering fine works in classical forms. This anthology offers some of the winning poems from the first two years of the competition, together with comments by the judges and essays by several of the people involved.