"Concentric circles" by Yang Lian (Bloodaxe, 2005)

Translated by Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-Chong Chan.

The back cover says - "The book, like its sections, 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 cycles, in ever-widening concentric structures, 'to transform the diachronic life-experiences into the synchronic poetry". In the preface he points out the difficulties of translating such a work from Chinese because of the different way tenses are dealt with.

There are 6 pages of translators' notes at the end, concluding with "Perhaps Yang Lian's poetry can show us that, if we stretch language to its breaking point, we will be able to glimpse behind the straining structure of the known a new kind of poetry, an anti-poetry defined by the absences and silences of the poetry we knew. This has been the object of the journey we have undertaken, stress-testing both our languages as we went, in an effort to delineate a diagram of the very strange world that is the poetry of Yang Lian, across whose exotic waters we have voyaged, alternately dazed and delighted."

It's over my head. The quotes below caught my eye - apologies for taking them out of context -

• "fear of cold left behind by the cold ... then wind not among withered branches but human bones only" (p.17)
• "a thousand cacti married to a composer's night/ from high above goats' empty orbits" (p.18)
• "plaster roses when unpluckable forever must be anything but the post-mortem summoned by your funeral make-up" (p.24)
• "heavy fog exhaled from this mouth disperses a century's audience" (p.27)
• "the daughter unearths the phosphorus dying in each word's heart" (p.33)
• "thirty drops of semen spurt out/ dead fish overflow from thirty black moles on its own body/ thirty faces constitute a null time" (p.41)
• "the clouds above a criminal meadow/ caress an address again" (p.46)
• "a madly barking dog discerns the goodwill of the rotting map" (p.46)
• "yellow waves of jaundice break into a basket of ripened apples/ it's New York auctioned off to the festering yellow snow" (p.59)
• "group sex abandons a face/ history mops up assumptions and is sintered into a horrible ejaculation" (p.64)
• "you use the colour of flesh to condense the ocean's hunger" (p.65)
• "garden a drop of blindingly bright ink in the thought of the dead" (p.92)

I like p.37.