A Communist in Hong Kong (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Simon Elmer | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

When I first went to Hong Kong in January 2024, I quickly realised that to try and write about China in the way I have written about Britain was impossible. My previous books came out of a decade of writing about UK politics; whereas not only the languages, but also the culture, of China were completely foreign to me. It would take me a decade and more even to begin to write anything knowledgeable about the present of that vast, complex and foreign country. I decided, therefore, to write my observations of that foreignness and complexity, and to do so within the form of verse, which is better suited to such a role. I mean these observations to be more than the passing impressions of the tourist; and while part of what they record is my incomprehension at what I saw, they are framed by the political differences between a rapidly declining West and a resurgent East, and my hopes for the latter.

I make no apology for being a poet who tries to understand the world outside the dreamland of woke ideology in which the mass of contemporary poets live and write, or who refuses to repeat the fictions written by far better writers than they at the United Nations, European Commission, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, World Health Organization, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, World Economic Forum and other dream factories of stakeholder capitalism. If poetry still has a role to play other than that of a mouthpiece for these agencies and the ideologies they espouse, it will have to engage critically and knowledgeably with the New World Order they have built, rather than continue to parrot its lies and threats. This, my second book of poetry, contains my most recent and concerted attempts to do that in verse.This book is composed of several elements. The poems, written not only in China but throughout the three years since I moved to Hong Kong, including summers in Europe and winters in Japan, are the backbone of the book. These are not limited to my observations about this strange new world but include, as poetry has a habit of doing, my more personal struggles with being an immigrant again. Two poems reflect on the war in the Gaza Strip, which entered its latest phase three months before I arrived. Several more contain my fears for the Europe I left behind - temporarily, it turns out - and above all for my homeland, Britain. A book on China that doesn't say something about why I went there wouldn't make sense, at least not to me. Nor does it seem gracious to publish my observations of Hong Kong and China without also turning just as critical an eye on that failing polity that has come to be called 'the UK'. The final poem contains my reflections on the country to which I returned.In addition to a preface, each poem also has a note, which is not explanatory but, apart from identifying some of the poetic and literary references, also relates some of the biographical and historical contexts in which the poem was written. This has allowed him to convey further his impressions of and research on China, as well as on the catastrophe that is overwhelming Europe. In this sense, this book is a document of his time there, and the poems, therefore, are arranged roughly in chronological order, together with the date of their composition and the place in which they were written or at least started. There are several precedents for an author adding notes to his own poems. For him, it has been a way to situate his verse within the extraordinary and extraordinarily dark times in which they were written and are published today. But the poems can be read without them, and for that reason he has placed the notes at the end of the book, to be consulted or not by the reader.