Across the Darkness of the River

Poet, painter, and essayist Hsi Muren is perhaps the most widely read woman poet in Taiwan. Ever since her first two collections of poetry, Seven Miles of Fragrance (1981) and Youth of No Regret (1983), she has attracted readers for her themes of undying love and a melancholic sense of the lost past. As a poet of Mongolian descent, moreover, Hsi presents in her poetry a diasporic nostalgia for a lost world from a perspective that is imaginary but insistently poignant. As translator Chang Shu-li writes, "Using Mongol as a sign for an inaccessible past gives her poems of nostalgia an extra urgency, with her stress falling less on the remembrance of things past than on the resistance to forgetting. It is perhaps this implicit tension between sentimental nostalgia and diasporic nostalgia that makes her poems on Mongol appealing to readers similarly forced to the diasporic situation by the political conflicts between Taiwan and China."

Collected here for the first time in English, Hsi's poems speak profoundly of an awkward poise between the anxiety of remembering and the need to forget.