“HOLOGLYPHS III – Vespers”
This new collection of poems will constitute the third volume from S. K. Yeatts including over 80 new works. Highlights will feature additional Chan Koan “Cases” in the style of the Mumonkan & Hekiganroku, adding to his initial Beyond the Blue Cliff opus.
“S. K. Yeatts writes at the meeting point of Western elegy and East Asian poetic restraint, setting haiku-precision and ink-wash color images against the longer cadences of myth, science, and history. Whether invoking Crazy Horse, Ingeborg Bachmann, or Hugh Everett’s branching worlds, the poems bloom into to snow, gardens, and gathering dusk as figures for loss, asking what equations – of love, of physics, of grief – can ever be balanced. The result is a body of work at once spare and cosmological: small, exact gestures that open onto underworlds, multiverses, and the long afterlife of those who have gone before.” – CWB
“The Lotus Pool Collection: Three Hundred Tang Poems“
This new English translation of the Tang Dynasty poets portends a high watermark for rendering Tang poetry into living English. The central differentiator for this new translation is its focus on reanimating Tang poetry in English while remaining faithful to the Chinese poem’s world, restraint, ethos, and the original poet’s unique voice. It is founded on the classic tradition associated with Sun Zhu’s Three Hundred Tang poems and takes its title from his signature: “A Retired Scholar at the Lotus Pool.” Rather than simply reproducing the inherited Qing-era table of contents, the collection expands to eighty-five poets and revises the selection to recover a fuller range of Tang achievement, including lesser-known poets and brilliant women such as Shangguan Wan’er, Xue Tao, and Yu Xuanji. This is not a scholarly apparatus-driven project, but a poet’s recovery of one of the world’s great lyric civilizations into contemporary English.