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    The Ruined Elegance: Poems
    The Ruined Elegance: Poems
    The Ruined Elegance: Poems
    Ebook67 pages35 minutes

    The Ruined Elegance: Poems

    By Fiona Sze-Lorrain

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    About this ebook

    A lyrical collection that explores the interplay between poetry and history

    In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches." There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertész, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience," Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "ruins" and "elegance," and how the experience of both defies judgment.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateSep 29, 2015
    ISBN9781400873432
    The Ruined Elegance: Poems
    Author

    Fiona Sze-Lorrain

    Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a fiction writer, poet, musician, translator, and editor. She writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), and fifteen books of translation. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Best Translated Book Award among other honors, she was a 2019–20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. She lives in Paris and has performed worldwide as a zheng harpist.

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    Book preview

    The Ruined Elegance - Fiona Sze-Lorrain

    THE RUINED ELEGANCE

    PRINCETON SERIES OF CONTEMPORARY POETS

    Susan Stewart, series editor

    For other titles in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets see page 63

    THE RUINED ELEGANCE

    Poems

    Fiona Sze-Lorrain

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

    Princeton & Oxford

    Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press

    Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

    In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

    press.princeton.edu

    Jacket image: Cy Twombly, Untitled VII (Bacchus), 2005 © Cy Twombly Foundation.

    All Rights Reserved

    The epigraph is from The Desert of Love: Selected Poems, by János Pilinszky, translated by János Csokits and Ted Hughes (Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), 26. Reprinted by permission of Anvil Press Poetry.

    Lines from Pensées, by Blaise Pascal, translated with a revised introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin Classics, 1966; rev. ed., 1995), 29. Copyright © 1966, 1995 by A. J. Krailsheimer. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

    ISBN 978-0-691-16750-3

    ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-16769-5

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959230

    British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

    This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond and Scala Sans

    Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

    Printed in the United States of America

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    Contents

    I   WRONG EPIC

    Given Silence   3

    Towering   4

    I Wait for the Ruined Elegance   5

    Back from the Aegean Sea   6

    In the Thick of It   7

    Ionian Supper   9

    Partita, but Nothing to Do with Bach   10

    Few Days before Christmas   13

    II   IN A GODLESS TIME

    Beginning   17

    Spring Massacre   18

    Mausoleum   19

    Backstage   20

    Day Seven   21

    Center of a Journey   22

    Am I What the Lake Gave Me   23

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