The Colors of Dawn: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry by Brother Anthony of Taizé & Chung Eun-Gwi

Abstract

of association on multiple levels of human experience. In other words, many of these poems speak directly to the body part as if it were a whole person and then continue to name and rename it metaphorically. For example, in “Ode to the Clitoris,” she begins: “Little eagerness; / flower-girl basket of soft thorn / and petal, near the entry of the satin / column of the inner aisle; / scout in the wilderness; wild ear / which perks up; tender dowser, which points.” Here, the clitoris is immediately transformed into the flower-girl basket brought to the wedding and the vagina to the inner isle where the union takes place. Then the clitoris becomes a messenger in a wilderness of sexual attraction, alerting and alerted, and then it becomes that which points to the waters of life—all in six lines. Of course, such full identification of heart and spirit with body poses implicit questions and considerations. What happens , as in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich , when the same flesh of which we were proud and satisfied when we were young becomes the source of the greatest possible pain later in life? Do we sing it then? Does the spirit perish with the body, not as rider in the vehicle but as mere epiphenomenon? Olds’s poetry provokes these deliberations and others, at least in the reader; in her poems, the jury is still out. Fred Dings University of South Carolina The Colors of Dawn: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry. Ed. Brother Anthony of Taizé & Chung Eun-Gwi. Honolulu. University of Hawai’i Press. 2016. 170 pages. Korea’s rapid ascent to first-world status in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is astonishing. In addition to economic and political power, Korea offers the world a rich and vibrant culture, most often seen through Korean food, cinema, and pop music, or K-pop. Korean literature, however , as most recently illustrated in Han Kang’s 2016 Man Booker International Prize award for The Vegetarian, is following close behind. The Colors of Dawn: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry is an instructive and wonderful point of entry into Korean poetry. The Colors of Dawn is a beautiful Mānoa volume, first printed in 2015 and then reprinted with corrections this year, augmented with delightful floral illustrations by Hye Woo Shin. Editors Chung Eun-Gwi and Brother Anthony of Taizé have selected poems from a wide landscape of modern Korean poetry and do most of the translations themselves. The forty-four poets are organized in three parts: “Poetry of Today,” “Survivors of War,” and “Founding Voices.” Rather than starting with past and moving to present, the editors start with the present because they see how these poets “speak for the present and foreshadow Korea’s future.” Indeed, these contemporary Korean poets are doing exactly what so many of today’s readers seek: “to find meaning and value in a world of consumerism , materialism, and self-interest.” For example, in “Extinction,” Jin Eun-young warns us: “the world is starting to tilt.” Song Kyung-Dong challenges our borders and the urge to homogenize: “It is morally wrong for me, / being such a borderless thing, to be obsessed with a single idea.” Finally, Choi Jeongrye deftly appropriates Shakespeare in “Shall Time’s Best Jewel from Time’s Chest Lie Hid?” An essential part of this anthology is the inclusion of so many poets across the span of Korea’s modernization. In part 2, “Survivors of War,” Ko Un’s ten untitled poems stand out as explorations of pain, persistence, and the power of poetry that transcends time. From “The Founding Voices,” Cheon Sangbyeong crafts stark poems whose meaning resides in the aftermath of the reading. I mention only several poets and poems here, but this collection is filled with beauty , intelligence, play, and pleasure. Brooke A. Carlson Chaminade University Eileen Chong. Painting Red Orchids. Sydney. Pitt Street Poetry. 2016. 77 pages. Eileen Chong identifies writing as “an act of recovery, of piecing together, of recording, re-ordering and re-inventing.” In Painting Red Orchids, her third collection, the poet scans the stormy dissonance of places populated by particular emotional weathers, and this short book of lyrical investigation is a virtuosic...