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Publication of Coming Ashore Far From Home was supported by the Hong
Kong Arts Development Council.
Peter Stambler is among Hong Kong's most
distinguished poets and a foremost academic in the establishment of
Humanities studies in Hong Kong. Coming Ashore Far From Home contains poems
selected from his first five books of poetry, originally published in
United States, China and Hong Kong. This volume of selective work
exposes Stambler's deep roots as an American poet while also showing
the profound impact upon his poetry of his experience in Hong Kong.
Wilderness Fires takes as its subject the
Peshtigo Fire, the single most destructive fire in American history.
The book is concerned with the settling of the American wilderness,
with the cultural heritage immigrants brought with them into the dense
forests, with the strength and fragility of human community.
Witnesses deals with the experience of 18th
and 19th century visitors to the United States. Using the diaries,
letters, memoirs of such travelers, Stambler creates diverse
portraits of the new America.
Unsettled Accounts considers the lives of
Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, and their protιgι Johannes Brahms.
More covertly, it is a book about fathers and children, about the
creative life, about what we leave behind for our children's
generation.
Encounters with Cold Mountain is a collection
of modern versions of the poems of Han Shan, the Tang Dynasty master.
These poems, so brief and tantalizing, hope to bridge the distance
between the ninth century and 20th century poetic minds, between
ancient China and modern America.
In The Shespak Letters, an Amnesty
International volunteer tries to engage the attention of a Soviet
prosecutor who has secured the unjust conviction of a religious
dissident. This writing reflects Stambler's work in Hong Kong with
P.E.N., for which he was once president of the Hong Kong
(English-speaking) Chapter.
The compact disc which accompanies this book offers
two other approaches to his work. The first is his reading of selections
from each book. Some may find it helpful to listen to the poet's voice
as they construct their own imaginative performance. The second is the
1983 Wisconsin Public Radio production of his verse radio drama, The
Badger. The text of this play is not included in the book.
Critics Comments
Peter Stambler's work is not included in Hong Kong
University Press's forthcoming anthology of Hong Kong literature.
According to the anthology's editor Xu Xi, the book "didn't quite fit
edit focus." Before Peter Stambler left Hong Kong,
Professor Shirley Lim, newly appointed head of the English Department
of the University of Hong Kong, wrote a scathing review of Coming
Ashore Far from Home that appeared in the South China Morning
Post under the title "Coming Ashore for a Wander." In that review
Professor Lim questioned the appropriateness of Asia 2000 publishing
the book and of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council supporting it.
Asia 2000's request for an opportunity to rebut Professor Lim's
remarks was denied. See The Peter
Stambler Issue for both Professor Lim's review and Asia 2000's
unpublished response.
"Fascinating and
penetrating...a treatise about the music of love and the love of
music, with sidebars on madness, ego, and the politics of art."
American
Book Reviews on Unsettled Accounts "...disturbing reminders
that we who have the freedom to express our opinions tend to forget
those who do not. As well as the gift of the poet, Stambler possesses
the magnetic skills of orator and actor."
South
China Morning Post on The Shespak Letters
"Writing always in a
spacious and musical line, Stambler gives us a variety of
characters...and nearly every conceivable social and religious
metaphor for fire and wilderness appears. Yet the author's true
achievement lies in the pluralistic vision and self effacement of a
fine fiction writer."
Council for
Wisconsin Writers
Prize Citation for Wilderness Fires
"The reading of this
carefully crafted book is a poignant experience. Having shared the
suffering of these frontier people, one is uplifted by their courage
and creative spirit."
Milwaukee
Journal on Wilderness Fires
"...provocative, one of the
most unusual moments in radio I can recall....The result is a superb
radio script."
Airwaves
Magazine on The Badger
"One strength of Stambler's
book is that it gives a clear sense of the way 'wilderness' fires the
imagination of his characters, and the writer does justice to the
complexity of the experience. For the wilderness was both natural and
cultural, and their memories are keys to the cultural pasts they had
either left behind or escaped....Wilderness Fires shows taste
and honesty in handling an important subject; it deserves to be read."
Dakota
Arts Quarterly on Wilderness Fires
"Not counting the anthology to be unveiled on
Thursday, [Peter Stambler] has produced five slim volumes of verse.
[The collection includes extracts from all five books.]
"His first two mull over a theme that obviously
started working its way up through Prof Stambler's consciousness after
he moved from the cosmopolitan urban centres of the east coast, to
become part of a community in the real America, the great heartland of
the mid-West. The concern is a perennial one for poets from any
nation, especially for one with a short history like the United
States. Namely, what is America? Who are we Americans and where do we
come from?
"Wilderness Fires ponders the question with a
series of takes on life seen through the eyes of the people who
created America: the European immigrants who pushed West through the
wilderness during the 19th century. The collection centres on the
small pioneering Wisconsin community of Peshtigo in 1871, a year when
it was galvanised by the worst fire in US history, claiming 1,200
lives and incinerating a quarter million acres of surrounding forest.
"In Witnesses, Prof Stambler's second and
most popular collection for readings, the viewpoint switches to the
outside. The new civilisation is observed by the likes of Charles
Dickens, Alexis de Tocqueville and Frances Trollope men and women of
letters who recorded visits made to the US earlier in the 1800s. Prof
Stambler uses the technique of 'found poem' to rearrange and distil
their memoirs, diaries and letters into the format of a guidebook to
his adolescent nation.
"In his third work, the main concerns are closer to
home, quite literally. Unsettled Accounts explores the life of
the great German composer Robert Schumann, his romance with his wife
Clara, their struggle to raise eight children, love, marriage, sex,
and the romantic genius' final insanity. This work garnered Prof
Stambler the prestigious Quarterly Review of Literature International
Poetry Prize.
"This was before the move to Hong Kong, where he
picked up a translation of the great Tang dynasty poet Han Shan. 'The
foreword said Han did not come over well in translation, and I
thought, 'That may or may not be so, but this stuff I'm reading is
terrible.' ' As an experiment, the professor tried doing the job
himself reinterpreting Han's poems into modern American English.
Imagery might be changed here and a setting there, but what he saw as
the essence of each would always be preserved.
"'It was a wonderful exercise for me,' he says,
'to take my normally big, baggy and emotional way of writing and adapt
it to Han's terse style, where nothing is ever said straight out.'
"Fifteen of these experiments were published in
international poetry journals, where they were so well-received Prof
Stambler eventually released a collection of 135 of Han's verses
under the title of Encounters with Cold Mountain (a literal
translation of Han Shan).
"If the work of many artists evidences a mellowing
out in later life, as Prof Stambler approaches the end of middle age,
he has become decidedly more angry. The stance of his most recent
work, The Shespak Letters, is unambiguously political. Its
poems draw heavily on the professor's experience as a political
campaigner. Throughout the early 1990s as a member of the
international political-rights-for-writers organisation Poets,
Essayists and Novelists (Pen), he lobbied for and in five cases won
the release of Vietnamese dissidents, held as economic migrants in
the Whitehead detention centre in Hong Kong.
"More pertinently, years before in the US, Prof
Stambler was a member of Amnesty International, fighting for freedom
for victims of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
"'Like most Amnesty volunteers, I was writing
letters of appeal to those responsible for keeping dissidents in
prison, a tactic that very occasionally works. Shespak
recreates this almost invariably one-sided correspondence, following
the letters of a fictional campaigner writing to a Soviet prosecutor
in the Brezhnev era, from initial enthusiasm into frustration and
despondency,' he says.
"The evolution of Western civilisation, indeed, and
not just American civilisation, seems to be at the bottom of just
about everything he does. Moreover, his career in Hong Kong to date
may have a lot to say about where Asian civilisation is heading.
"If there is more critical, creative thinking around
the development of which is the ultimate goal of universities a
lot of people would give credit to Prof Stambler's humanities courses.
"'Before this place was geared towards turning out
accountants and technicians. Now, I hope we're producing educated
individuals who can think, speak and write clearly, and continue
through life as self teachers,' he says.
"Proponents of Asian values
might well think Hong Kong got its money's worth out of Prof Stambler
on this count. But they would be less welcoming of the principles for
which he has served as a Trojan horse. Yet this is part and parcel of
the professor's design."
Steven Ribet,
Hong Kong Standard,
25 January, 2000
"From the get-go, an admission: it's a fool's errand
to introduce a poet's collected works, especially when the prose,
however good, pales when compared to the poetry being talked about.
And this is certainly the case here.
"This is not poetry for the faint hearted; be
assured of that. What resonates through much of this wonderful
collection is Peter Stambler's often dark vision. We get it early on
from the mouth of Henrik Ibsen in the letter poem to his literary
brother in America, Olaf. 'All men cry from the wilderness;/ No man is
elsewhere.' It's clear too that in the letter poem in particular and
in the narrative form, Stambler finds his venue, donning mask after
remarkable mask in both genders, stepping through history as if he'd
invented it, which, in order to discover the truth, well, he has. He's
come to witness, this poet. In a wonderful, prophetic few lines from
Spoken to Patrick McDonough's horse, he says about a book he's
reading late into the night, 'Lord it's long I blow at my candle./
In half a second, the light flickers/ And goes black, snuffed out by
Wisconsin,/ The air I came to, inhale, absorb, become.' Its tone and
direction permeate the work, this idea of becoming, to witness as he
himself says in his second book in the collection, to be shaped by the
journey of living in America and abroad.
"He seems to have taken Roethke's advice, too,
writing these poems, by showing as many sides of himself as is
decently possible. So humor and irony abound. Take, for example,
Rose Skinner on suffrage: 'Miss President, feller-wimmen, and male
trash generally:/ I am here to discuss women's rights, recuss/ Her
wrongs and cuss the men. As a success,/ Man is a failure, and I bless
my stars/ My mother was a woman.' Does it get better than that? In my
judgment, it is the range of this book that dazzles. It's not
self-absorbed. It's not one-dimensional. And it does another thing
it risks the sentimental without which poetry cannot rise to
greatness. Read, for example, Want ads, haiku-like poems, for a
chilling account of American slavery, the degradation of the human
spirit.
"In Unsettled Accounts, his third collection,
a tour de force by any standard one cares to judge it, Stambler
is a master of the dramatic voice. I find myself leaning into the
poems as if they were coming from a stage, a historical drama. I'm
mildly disappointed that I can not, somehow, hear Robert Schumann's
music. It's that alive, the narrative, the voices, the sense of
despair, joy, mystery, the great musician, sick, alone, talking to his
daughter where be begins his letter, 'Elise, my gremlin....'
"But Stambler's powers of invention do not end with
the enduring recreation of powerful historical figures. Next he turns
his imagination to the short, lyrical poems of Han Shan in
Encounters with Cold Mountain.
"The perfect title, this. Stambler, the poet from
Wisconsin (he'd tell you East Coast, but he's Midwestern), bringing
his sense of wonder, play, American language sensibility to ancient
Chinese verse. It's a gift to read these new adaptations, the way in
which each poem complements and enlarges Stambler's own darker vision.
"Consider A farmer's cry carries all this
distance: 'It hardly matters that I shut my door on them:/ The
years speed through my hut like crackling sparks:/ Men's lives, each
one a ghostly flickering./ Not one becomes immortal, not one/ The
white crane of our desires./ How can I speak?'
"Cold Mountain is a mythical land, as our Midwestern
poet knows, always paradoxical in its longing an existential
awakening out of which so much beauty flows. This time, across
language and geographical boundaries.
"This collection, ending as it does with The
Shespak Letters, is a remarkable distillation of poetic voices. In
a letter to me Peter once said, reflecting on his own poetry, 'P.S.
gets to play in history's sandbox.' Indeed he does, but this time the
voice does an extraordinary thing; it becomes both a personal and a
public voice. While the poet shares with Mr. Shespak, the Soviet
prosecutor who receives these letters, his own beginnings in America,
his personal struggle for dignity and self-worth and that of his
boyhood friends compelling reasons for Shespak to release Vasily
Vishnikov from prison on the larger, world stage, Stambler, like
great orators before him (I think of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson),
speaks for the ages, in defense of the personal liberties of all men.
"'...A man's life is single,/ Isolate, needful,
terrible for him/ To contemplate. He faces many pains,/ Darkness not
of his own making, and none/ Will accompany him. It is his right,/
Therefore, to seek what communion he can,/ And we must oblige.'
"Page after page in this
turbulent, visionary work, I keep thinking, 'So this is what poetry
can be.'"
Tom Crawford,
Author
I Want To Say Listen (1982)
If It Weren't For
Trees (1987)
Lauds (1993 winner of the Oregon Book Award)
and China Dancing (1996)
Readers Comments
Extract
Copyright © Peter
Stambler
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