In a Seed: Poems of Hyang-Ah Lee

From the publisher’s website:

In a Seed contains 60 poems by the author, which best represent the poet’s creative life over a period of fifty years. The poems of Hyang-Ah Lee are very touching, for they have inner strength to bravely cope with agonies without disregarding the realities of life teetering all the time on the edge of a cliff. Instead of accepting her poetic objects sensuously, she tries to restructure them with poetic imaginations by dissecting and analyzing the essence. Lee always tries to identify life’s questions with an introspective attitude. Her poems have deep resonance because their roots reach to the base of spiritual domain all humans share.

Hyang-Ah Lee was born in Seocheon and spent much of her youth in Gunsan Chollabukdo. She studied Korean literature & language and received her doctorate from Kyunghee University. She made a successful debut in 1966 through “Hyundae Munhak”, a prestigious literary magazine and published a total of 19 volumes of poems and 15 volumes of essays as well as 7 books of literary theory during the past 50 years. She won Kyunghee Literature Award, Kwangju Literature Award, Korea Literature Award, Yoon Dong Joo Literature Award, Poetic Works Award, Midang Simaek Award and Changjo Munye Award. She is now professor emeritus of Honam University at which she taught until her retirement.

Joo-Hyun Song studied English Literature and Language at Seoul National University and worked for Hyundai Corporation etc for 34 years. He received New Translator Award in 2012 from “Changjo-Munye”, a Korean literary magazine, for his translation of the English/Korean poems. He translated Haeng-Sook Kim’s book of poems “as a lamp is lit”, which was published in a bilingual edition in Seoul in 2013.