In a Flash of Lightning: Fifty-four Poems of Cosmic Vision

“In a Flash of Lightning” is a look into narrative and lyric universes of elegance, raw sorrows, and the joys of human existence. But, as is the case with most contemporary Chinese poetry, such work is unknown in Canada. Presented here is a volume that astounds in its breadth and international scope, crossing linguistic, cultural, and geographic distances. In Zhao Si we have a poet who demonstrates a profound awareness not only of her own traditions and mythology, but of the literature and legends that inform Western poetry. Her work is a weft of allusions, references, and traditions.

REVIEWS

“Zhao Si speaks to us as a woman from contemporary China, infusing her poetry with the great writers from her country’s past that shaped and shook up Western ways of knowing, but also bringing into her words and forms, modern European and North American sensibilities because of her wide-ranging erudition and her own award winning translations of poets places far from Beijing. Her work is, at the same time, philosophical and sensual. She has the amazing gift to place the reader both in the here and now and in a future we have yet to imagine, except in her words.”

— LORNA CROZIER

“Zhao Si is a poet of the infinite. She perceives enormous questions – the structure of the universe, the way in which time expands and contracts, and the realms of quantum physics and Hawking cosmos – in the same breath as she watches a beggar outside a subway station, a woman riding a bicycle through rain, or a homeless man with skin maladies. A keen observer of what exists right before her eyes, Zhao Si is constantly reminding her reader that the macrocosm exists in the microcosm, that what is visible in the finite is also to be perceived in the infinite if we are willing to open our eyes.”

—from BRUCE MEYER’s Introduction

I like your metaphysical poems best, and they are the very best in this collection, the vast perspectives you allow your reader to dwell in. They reminded me, in a way, in the great astronomical spaciousness they evoked, of the early books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. These poems will sound strange, unprecedented (no one else achieves these effects) in North American English, but quite exciting – they introduce a new cosmic point of view.

— TIM LILBURN

The precision and clarity of Zhao Si's poems suggest that they arrive from the deepest promptings of her spirit in order to orient the reader toward the mystery at the heart of human experience. In a Flash of Lightning reveals a landscape that is at once familiar and strange, the outlines of which the poet names and describes with uncommon skill. This is a wonderful book.

—CHRISTOPHER MERRILL

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