Beating on Iron

From the publisher’s website:

Kim Soo-Bok has been publishing poetry for 40 years in South Korea. This volume contains translations of the poet’s own selection from his entire life’s work, representing poems marked by compassion and sensitivity, which often adopt a surrealist position in presenting their relationships between the poet and the surrounding world.

Many of the poems evoke the Korean landscape, with its rough mountains, harsh winters, extensive mud flats, trees, birds, and flowers. The modern city is usually left far behind and the poet is confronted with the mortality and transience that characterize the world of nature with its ever-changing seasons. The poet writes in such a way as to resist these reminders of his own impermanence while at the same time confessing its inevitability. Birth, age, and death are the universal pattern of life, and Kim Soo-Bok constantly seeks the beauty of that pattern while sensing that beyond it extends a mystery of Eternity.

Born in Hamyang, South Gyeongsang Province, Korea, in 1953, Kim Soo-Bok graduated from the Korean Language and Literature Department of Dankook University, Seoul, and continued his studies there to the completion of his doctorate. He has received the Pyeonun Award and the Award for Lyric Poetry. He is at present a professor in the Creative Writing Department of Dankook University.

Translator Brother Anthony of Taizé was born in England in 1942 and came to Korea in 1980. He taught English Literature for many years in the English Department of Sogang University, Seoul, where he is now an emeritus professor. He has published some 30 volumes of translations of modern Korean poetry and fiction, including work by Ko Un and Lee Si-young (books published by Green Integer), as well as Kim Seung-Hee, Shin Kyong-Nim and Ku Sang. He is currently a Chair-Professor at Dankook University, where Kim Soo-Bok and Lee Si-young teach creative writing. His Korean name is An Sonjae.