Ouyang Yu

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Biographical note:  Ouyang Yu graduated from La Trobe University with a doctoral degree in Australian literature. He has published more than twenty books in Chinese and English in the fields of fiction, poetry, literary translation and literary criticism. His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, was short-listed for the 2003 NSW Premier’s Awards. His third book of poetry, Foreign Matter, won the 2003 Fast Books Prize for Best Poetry in the self-published category in NSW, Australia.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857356
ISBN-10:  1876857358
ISBN-13:  9781876857356
Author:  Ouyang Yu
Title:  New and Selected Poems
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-04
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This book includes selection from Ouyang Yu’s poetic work, published or unpublished, for more than a decade straddling the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century, in work such as Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997), Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes (2002) and Foreign Matter (2003), a selection which provides the best introduction to his work.

Table of contents:
Uncollected poems
An Identity CV
Conversations with Computer
The Ungrateful Immigrant
Someone
“I don’t have any friends”
“I love sleep”
If She Had a Gun
Interview with Sheila Australia
Stupidity
Stereotypes
Busy
“it was just at that moment”
Albania
A Journal Entry, 15 October 2001
from Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997)
3
6
8
9
11
13
14
16
18
23
27
37
43
46
48
53
64
71
75
77
80
91
92
from Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes (2002)
Beautiful Death
Melbourne, Grey Melbourne
Memory
Memory of a Supermarket
On a Sunny Noon
Untitled
The Bridge
The Pig Incident
The Poet
Winter
Untitled
Watching the Moon
Untitled
Untitled
The City
The Train
Untitled
“Tonight Is My Birthnight”
Dusk in a Wuhan Suburb
Untitled
The Wanderer
The Spring
The Dog Outside the Door
Christmas, 1993
Hay Fever
Impressions of an Autumn
The Oriental Girl in William Street
To My Contemporaries
Second Drifting
The Double Man
In A Wakeful Dream
Three Scenes in a Melbourne Winter
Dream Snow in Melbourne
Night Thoughts (2 poems)
Far and Near
from Foreign Matter (2003)
Democracy
them/us
Being Difficult
Career Counselling to a Student of English
from Terminally Poetic
“can you write a bad poem”
Going through the cards
A man of future speaks about love
The most unwanted man
Negative answers : an interview about poetry
Terminally poetic

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Excerpt from book:  

Stereotypes

don’t believe the critics
as if human beings
are more than
stereotypes
they ARE stereotypes
it’s only when they are not
there’s a problem
for example
when a passive oriental woman
is no longer passive
she performs the act of castration
on her man
be he an oriental or occidental or even accidental
when an australian is not
“I couldn’t care less”
he’s into serial murder –
human society is propelled along
by stereotypes
like you and me
not the critics who criticise
whose only raison d’etre is
to accuse human beings
of being portrayed as stereotypes
and to accuse stereotypes
of not being human beings

Unpublished endorsement:  Ouyang Yu’s poetic voice is strident, passionate, tough minded and intimate. It pulsates with anger. Here verse is used as a weapon. The poetry in this New and Selected is strongly political, resonant and dynamic. It invites you ‘in’ and demands to be read.

Anne Pender

Unpublished endorsement:  Ouyang Yu is one of the most powerful voices to emerge in Australian poetry during the 1990s. New and Selected Poems shows the full range of his work – comic, demotic, lyrical, angry, but always engaged and engaging.

Elizabeth Webby

Unpublished endorsement:  There is an idealism, passion and vitality in Yu’s work that has not often been seen in Australian poetry since the 1970s. It presents itself as the anger and disappointment of a Chinese immigrant in a land which has failed to honour its promises, but the issues are broader. He is a kind of early-twenty-first-century everyman, a subject in crisis and transition, working just a little way ahead of most of us: someone we should watch, and think about carefully.

David Brooks

Unpublished endorsement:  Ouyang Yu’s New and Selected Poems is marked by an acrid wit, a strenuous intelligence, the fearlessness of its pessimism. ‘Floating … between China and Australia’, he is one of the most remarkable poets – and translators – working in this country.

Peter Pierce