Lloyd Haft, Zhou Mengdie's Poetry of Consciousness

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Lupke, Christopher

• This is a review of Lloyd Haft's pithy book-length treatment of the poetry of Taiwan-based poet Zhou Mengdie. Zhou was a loner and a bit of an itinerant, having been forced to flee mainland China for Taiwan and having to leave his family behind. His poetry includes much loneliness and sorry but ultimately a quiescence that is fortified by his deep study of Buddhism and Daoism. Few people know Zhou's poetry better than does Lloyd Haft, who has translated almost all of his important work into English. In this study, Haft homes in on several tendencies in Haft's poetry: his use of palindrome; his emphasis on the surface structure of perceived experience, phenomenological reality, or the primacy of consciousness; his pacing of the void; symmetry; dream; and the body. Haft includes several examples of the poetry in his analyses and invites the reader to verify his insights by reading the poetry itself.

• Date created

  2007-10-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Zhou Mengdie (Chou Meng-tieh);
  • contemporary Chinese poetry; Taiwan literature; Daoism; Buddhism; reversibility; palindrome; phenomenology; Husserl;
  • dream; body; exile.

• Type of Item

  Review

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-qrgf-ws34

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International