NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This is an impressive collection from a major Chinese Australian poet.

Throughout the 113-strong work, Ouyang Yu styles himself as ungrateful and displays an acute sensitivity to the plight of the immigrant, while acknowledging that he has learnt to thrive as an outsider. This slowly builds through the work, written over a seven year period, and maturates into the waybook of an everyman figure, relevant to every society, at all times.

	I'm disjointed
		Out of time and place
		I suppose I'm writing for myself

	we are eating ourselves new and raw
	with the passage of time

	wherever you go it comes back to you
	you are yourself and the loss of you
	hovering around the border and dreaming of the freedom on the other shore
	you have walked for a long time in the territory of the heart

Ouyang Yu lives in Melbourne, Australia; he is originally from China and publishes poetry and fiction in English and Chinese. A hundred-odd poems explore a few themes with great skill and, consequently, a good deal of wearing repetition. As in THE BONE OF A TREE, he certainly has an enviable knack of carving out firm original images:

	the beauty emerges:
	the steely skeleton of the burned-down high-rise
 
	the intact bone structure
	of an animal eaten clean
 
	and the bone of a tree like a steel fork
	that penetrates into a single moon

	i have no land of my own
	but a whole person of wishes

	do not experience the mysterious stillness of the night
	that enables me to hear voices from time immemorial and thousands of miles away

	the leaves of the wutong tree soughing
	the wind sound asleep in the green
	dripping, chirping
	one dimple after another on the water
	the umbrella slipping pit-pat by
	the leaves of the wutong tree soughing

	on a drizzling morning
	i am walking alone among the crowd
	hurriedly
	to work

	one place after another i go, welcomed only
	by the signal flags, peddlers on the platforms, and travellers
 
	dead nights on the desert and the plains and in the mountains
	i listen to my own timeless coughs and wheezes

	we both live
	in a world
	of separation
	and communion
 
	small as this room
	with two beds
 
	and large as two continents
	with one ocean between

	dusk again. among the after-work crowds you go home.
	the setting sun shines. rustles, streets golden, you go home.

	in australia
	i am as far from any australians
	as china is from australia
 
	and i am as near to them
	as a cloud
	is near the sky

	I love the waves of the lake
	but they don't love me
 
	I love the moon
	but it doesn't love me
 
	I love the tall mountains the sky and the ocean
	but they don't love me
 
	if anyone loves me
	they might as well love the tall mountains the sky the ocean the moon and the waves of the lake

The author's literary list is considerable, including other poetry collections, translations from English into Chinese, prose &c; the contents of this earlier work SONGS OF THE LAST CHINESE POET will come as no surprise to those conversant with his problems as an angry young Chinaman in Australia, where he has been for many years, with awards from there as well as recognition in China.

	Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
	The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated . . .

The anger springs from inability to identify with post-Mao eastern or western cultures. and there are problems over the dichotomy between those of ancient and modern China. One gets the impression that the culture before serious western trade contacts would be welcome:

	when winter is coming
	is death far away?
 
	haunted by it
	every once in a while
 
	the race deep within us
	towards the end
 
	of new beginnings
	we feel helpless before a gods-filled universe
 
	abandoned on the remotest island
	is a bird with no longer dream eyes

	three years on
	i no longer know what nationality i am
	i am a bit of everything

	this life we have updated to such a degree
	that with a colour photocopier
	we can easily xerox ourselves
	on an A4 or A3 of zero blankness            
	bored with life with all its advanced paraphernalia   
	we look forward to legalized excitement
	of the utopian euthanasia
 
	ah men

	history is not really a repetition of itself
	for who is more western than him
	who wanted to achieve unique chineseness
	by destroying all that is most chinese
	by embracing a totally alien western notion of communism
	originated by a half-savage half-human mar/x

	the middle country is no longer there
	the centre has gone elsewhere

	let's compose this last song of our twilight civilization     
	on the stinking feet just unbound

Over-drawn and over-painted as it may be for a purpose which goes further than simple self-indulgence, I think this book worth studying for wise men who see the veneers of superficialities being gradually glued over intrinsic core values and ethics of old civilizations, until they are something else entirely. In this construction there is always a last poet.

If there was an award for the WORST collection of the year — then MOON OVER MELBOURNE by Ouyang Yu would certainly be in the running.

If, as a casual browser, I had come across this collection in a book shop I would've returned it quickly to the shelves. Sometimes the challenge of reading an unappealing book from cover to cover helps the reader to discover positive features which may initially have gone unnoticed. However, this is not the case here.

Ouyang Yu, writer and translator, moved to Australia to complete a PhD at La Trobe University and soon transmogrified into Mr. Angry Chinaman from Melbourne.

The main theme of this collection is alienation and exile. However, pity the poor immigrant hardly applies in Yu's case — his seeming paranoia and egocentric self obsession, fed by a perception that most Australians are lazy Chinese hating xenophobes, precludes this from happening.

When Yu is not complaining about his feelings of alienation — ONE OF THEM:

	i know how lonely sometimes they can be
	i am one of them
	it's our secret

	another way of not seeing is staring into your eyes
	and right through until s/he sees someone behind 
	you

	When I was boarding the CAAC plane for home which is
	of course
	china
	i said to you through the arse hole of a window:
	fuck you australia!

	and all of a sudden i find my tongue
	held between two languages like a vice

	something so accidentally called poetry
	that consists only of  broken lines
	that i wrote auto-erotically

	sometimes i feel i could go on forever like this
	talking to you without
	feeling tired only feeling something akin to sadness
	emptiness self-pity
	deathliness of emotions all those things happening 
	simultaneously
	without caring what i say what i do for i infact do
	not say a thing
	only my hands are doing the typing instead of my
	tongue
	mouth  lips

	To me West has always stood for
	all that is best:
	freedom
	gold
	realisation of one's best orgasmic dreams
   
	until now when I realize with
	a shudder of the heart
	how Eastern it is 
	in its cruel indifference to people like us