Cirrus@Austlit

'Identifying a predominant focus in spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetries, this chapter suggests that diasporic self-mapping is often ambivalent as poets navigate shifting or liminal spaces. The chapter argues that geopolitical differences distinguish Asian Australian experiences from those of their Asian American counterparts. It examines the mediation of migration and understanding of past and present in the work of Ee Tiang Hong, and how transnational mobility informs the hybrid and spliced practice of Ouyang Yu and Merlinda Bobis. The chapter analyses an intergenerational feminist interest in borders and journeys in the work of Bobis and Eunice Andrada. It then examines how later-generation poets may face quite different challenges in navigating ancestral homeland and the search for connections, or, alternatively, find a freedom in travelling and uncertainty. The chapter also considers transcultural and translational strategies, and discusses Omar Sakr’s mapping of “unbelonging.” The chapter concludes by asserting that the rich heterogeneity of poetries cannot be reduced to a single term, even in such a disruptor term as “Asian Australian.”'

Source: Abstract

'In this new collection by a seasoned master, Kim Cheng Boey moves between Singapore and Australia, youth and middle age â" places and times rendered in vivid, sensory detail â" to give a haunting exploration of memory and the emigrant experience: departures and arrivals; family and home; exile, longing and loss.'  (Publication summary)

'Tracking the developments of Asian diaspora poetry in America, Australia, UK and Europe, To Gather Your Leaving is a groundbreaking global anthology that explores new ways of looking at nation, culture, identity, and place. Gathered here are established and new poets who are émigrés, refugees, and descendants of Asian migrants, poets who straddle two or more languages, cultures, and places, and who question and complicate the notion of home in the age of global change and transnational crossings. The poems collected here, spanning over three decades and representing three generations, eschew straightforward answers to the questions of identity and citizenship, offering profoundly rich, diverse and moving perspectives on what it means to belong on this earth.' (Publication summary) 

' He had just sat down to a flagon of wine in the Phoenix Inn in Luoyang when he heard the words that he instantly recognised as a drinking poem by Tao Yuanming. There was an inebriated lilt to it, but the voice was strong and deep, the tone rousing, melodious almost. He turned and looked at the man. He had a bronze complexion, well-chiselled features, a full sensuous mouth and angular jaw beneath the smooth trim beard. From under the thick arches of his eyebrows his hooded eyes looked at you in a dreamy yet penetrating gaze. On the table lay a long sword in its jade-green scabbard. An expectant crowd had gathered around, the younger ones leaning forward in reverent attention...' (Publication abstract)

This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage, spanning work that covers over three decades of writing. Inclusive of hitherto marginalised voices, these poems explore the hyphenated and variegated ways of being Asian Australian, and demonstrate how the different origins and traditions transplanted from Asia have generated new and different ways of being Australian. This anthology highlights the complexity of Asian Australian interactions between cultures and languages, and is a landmark in a rich, diversely-textured and evolving story. Timely and proactive this anthology fills existing cultural gaps in poetic expressions of home, travel, diaspora, identity, myth, empire and language. [from Trove]