Chen Li Poems

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In Front of the Temple Animal Lullaby   Rainstorm   Traveling in the Family
Microcosmos    The Edge of the Island   The Cat at the Mirror New Poems

Selected Poems of
Chen Li
Translated by Chang Fen-ling et al.

Chen Li (1954- ) is one of the best representatives of contemporary Chinese poetry in Taiwan. A winner of many important prizes of poetry in his country, he has written more than eight books of poetry, and has translated, with his wife Chang Fen-ling, works of many prominent poets—such as Plath, Larkin, Heaney, Neruda, Paz, Szymborska—into Chinese. He subtly combines in his poetry the elements of Western modernism and post-modernism with the merits of Oriental poetics and the Chinese language. He is a poet who humbly and incessantly seeks to find balance between art and life, suffering and joy, dream and reality.

In 1999, Chen Li was invited to Rotterdam Poetry International Festival. A selection of his poems, De Rand Van Hat Eiland, was translated into Dutch by Silvia Marijnissen and published by the Her Trage Vuur magazine in 2001. In 2004, he was invited to the Salon du livre de Paris, reading his poetry and having meetings with other Chinese writers from around the world.

"Chen Li is one of the most innovative and exciting poets writing in Chinese today. Ranging from the intensely lyrical to social satire, his work bears witness to the historical changes that have transformed contemporary Taiwan on the one hand, and to the poet's exuberant spirit of experimentation on the other. Chen Li's poetry not only epitomizes Taiwan's bitter-sweet quest for cultural identity, but, above all, it is an eloquent testament to the felicitous union of the personal and the political, artistic avant-gardism and literature of conscience."
—Michelle Yeh, University of California, Davis