Grass Roots: Selected Poems

Xiang Yang's poetry stands as elegant testimony to the Taiwan experience. From start to finish, the collection is an articulation of Taiwan's identity imbued with salient cultural details.

The range and variety of his seven books of poetry include the development of a new formalism, narrative verse forms, and a strong engagement with Taiwanese dialect poetry. Since the publication of his cycle The Four Seasons (1986) he has written little, publishing but a single collection titled Chaos in 2005. In the intervening years, he has earned a PhD in journalism and moved from journalism to academia, devoting himself primarily to teaching. Apart from writing and his academic life, Xiang Yang is an established woodblock artist.

Xiang Yang’s poetry stands as elegant testimony to the Taiwan experience. The author of seven volumes of poetry in his younger years, he has, since the publication of The Four Seasons (1986), published but a single collection titled Chaos, in 2005. In the intervening years, he earned a PhD in journalism and moved into academia. He is also an established woodblock artist.

John Balcom, PhD., is a translator of Chinese literature. Recent publications include Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (contributor), Wintry Night by Li Qiao (co-translator), The City Trilogy by Chang His-kuo, Taiwan’s Indigenous Writers: An Anthology of Stories, Essays, and Poems, which has received the 2006 Northern California Book Award. He translated ＂Driftwood＂ and ＂Stone Cell,＂ both by Lo Fu, which were published by Zephyr Press.