Love’s Silence and Other Poems

Yong-un Han (1879-1944) is recognised as Korea’s finest Buddhist poet of the twentieth century and also one of the country’s most influential political activists in the struggle against Japanese imperialism. Yong-un Han’s Buddhist insights and political passion combine to give his poetry great spiritual power. He describes the complexities of love as beginning in the desire for total union and leading to an illumination of the void or nothingness. Delighting in paradox, these are poems that tease us into a subtle understanding of the limitations of both self and union, while never denying the importance of political struggle. Now Jaihiun Kim and Ronald B. Hatch have translated his most famous collection — Love’s Silence — along with a selection of 16 other poems. Included also is a foreword detailing the life and publications of Yong-un Han.

(Originally published by Prairie Poet Books in 1985; republished by Ronsdale Press in 1999)