Bloom

Xi Chuan, the celebrated Chinese poet, translator, and scholar, began writing lyric poetry in the 1980s, and, due to the political unrest in China in the 1990s, developed a wilder verse, often in long lines. The poems in Bloom integrate Chuan’s multifarious literary influences—centuries of Chinese and Western texts—with sharp observations about contemporary life, human nature, and desire. 

Chuan’s poetry speaks, in Lucas Klein’s translation, in a vital, brash, and, at times, comic voice, paradoxically both cynical and idealistic. The collection opens with the long title poem, “Bloom,” a lush meditation that exhorts the addressee to: 

bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms 
bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical 

The poem’s “bloom” describes both a sexual unfolding—“I want to witness your nipples blooming your belly button blooming your toes blooming”—as well as a broader, and, in the poem’s terms, necessary, existential flourishing.

By contrast, later in the book, Chuan writes with pathos about life’s contraction in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In “Ode to Facemasks,” the speaker remembers wearing a mask “to resist smog,” “to make it through days of the avian flu and days of SARS and days of the novel coronavirus,” and “to avoid the mass surveillance system,” joking about people putting facemasks on pets (“this is the reality surrealist poetry is rooted in!”) before swerving into a more serious mode: 

There have been Chinese people getting beaten up on Sydney streets for wearing facemasks, or ordered to remove their facemasks by the police in Berlin. How can the naked mouths of Sydney and Berlin understand? This is our way of life and means of existence! 

Chuan offers his own surreal image near the end of the poem, perhaps in exasperation with the horrors of the pandemic: “If I could, I would put on a facemask and walk bare-assed into the desert to meet with fairies and angels.” 

The thrill of this collection arises from Chuan’s charismatic voice, vividly rendered by Klein, and the unexpected turns from the intellectual to the sensual, from the absurd to the dead-serious.