Empty Chairs: Selected Poems by Liu Xia, tr. Ming Di and Jennifer Stern

[Jenna]

Dolls, cigarettes, and birds are three of Liu Xia's favorite motifs. These outwardly mundane-seeming objects recur in the text of Empty Chairs with an obsessive frequency, their appearances and re-appearances invested with a teeteringly tall mythic significance, an almost-too-heavy-to-bear symbolic weight, which augments the poems' collective atmosphere of totalitarian menace and claustrophobia. Threaded through with symbolism and surrealism the way a small unventilated room might be permeated by invisible vapors of carbon monoxide, these poems evoke Liu Xia's closely circumscribed existence after being sentenced to house arrest by the anti-democratic Chinese government while separated from her husband, Liu Xiaobo, himself also a famous poet and an even more famous prisoner of conscience. In these oppressive circumstances, her integrity remains astonishingly intact:

I can't compare life with death,
truth with fabrications,
my palms with the backs of my hands. (from "Dark Night")

Liu Xia calls on Van Gogh, Kafka, and Marguerite Duras to be her guardian angels in her time of suffering, understanding all too well how enforced solitude may be separated from insanity, despair, and death by only the width of a sheet of writing paper. "How It Stands," the final poem, enacts a dialogue between the poet and her self, in which, against the odds and against the wishes of her oppressors, she reaffirms her commitment to endure:

Why draw a tree?
I like the way it stands.
Aren't you tired of being a tree your whole life?
Even when exhausted, I want to stand.

(For the rest of the poem, go here: http://www.pen.org/blog/liu-xia-rare-... .)

I haven't liked other contemporary Chinese poetry that I've read, so at first I was afraid I wouldn't like this book, but I found it stylistically very readable, and the poetry is so honest and intimate, it sears: e.g., there's one poem where Liu Xia reflects on her strained relationship with her mother-in-law, who blamed her for Liu Xiaobo's imprisonment, and how one day she overheard her mother-in-law saying, "Oh, why won't he just die," and she never forgave her for that comment. So much pain, and yet so artistically rendered. I would recommend this book to everyone. Kudos to Greywolf Press for putting it out -- the small presses of the world are doing such good, important work.

Here are six more poems from the collection: http://lithub.com/herta-muller-on-the... .

[Marin]

Hi Jenna,
I liked your review and the example poems. I have never read this poet's work. The question/answer style, suits the subject matter and confirms the fact that when pain has reduced experience to final words, they are often few and powerful. It is refreshing, amidst the deep pain in Liu's writing, to read poems of substance. This book is now on my list.

Marin

[Jen]

I've read the poetry at the link. I have to admit, I'm not enamored with the style but it does have a cumulative effect. And certainly "Why draw a tree?" is a marvelous, enduring poem. I've added it to my wish list.

[Jenna]

Thanks for reading and for your insightful comments, Marin and Jen. I agree with you, Jen, that these poems benefit from being read as a group due to recurring themes/motifs as well as the cumulative power of the poet's singular voice.