Dennis Vincent Brutus, China Poems

Craig McLuckie (Okanagan College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 7.2.3.03: South Africa and other Southern Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1975

Places

Zimbabwe (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

Dennis Brutus’ seventh volume is unified by his experiments with the Chinese Chueh chu (i.e., stop short or severed sentence) form, an antecedent of the Japanese haiku. The booklet’s 36 pages contain 27 poems (not all Chueh chu), interspersed with commentary on the form and on Brutus’ trip to the People’s Republic of China in August-September 1973 for the Friendship Invitational Table Tennis Tournament. The poems, “taken from [Brutus’s] notes” (5), are presented in his distinct calligraphy, with same-page translations into Chinese by Ko Ching-Po. Eighteen of the China Poems are reprinted, without the translations and some of the notes, in Stubborn Hope, “Victory Edition” (Washington, D…

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523 words

Citation: McLuckie, Craig. "China Poems". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 March 2004 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=12233, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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