Hope is Lonely

Kim Seung-Hee is regarded in her native Korea as being radically different from any other Korean poet, male or female, in her choice of themes and poetic expression as this selection from two of her recent collections demonstrates. Her poetry is strongly female and feminist, deeply personal, at times surreal, always humane. As John Kinsella writes: Her poems speak across lives and out of lives rather than of lives, and in this they liberate… Brother Anthony’s beautiful clarity of line and word allows the complexity of the poems…to shine through. This poetry, with its shattering lights, brightens the dark places…

This selection of Kim Seung-hee’s most recent poems is drawn half from her ninth collection, Hope is Lonely, and half from her tenth collection, Croaker on a Chopping Board. Focusing on humanity s utter fragility through, among others, the themes of death, hope, depression and love, often seen through the lens of sorrowful womanhood, these poems, be they modernist or romantic in idiom, also comment on political and social issues, and Korean society and culture in general. Brother Anthony s deeply sensitive translation, and his informative preface, make the work of this major Korean poet available for the first time in the UK.

Source: publisher’s website