Heart Into Soil: Selected Poems by Xue Di, translated by Keith Waldrop with Wang Ping, Iona Crook, Janet Tan and Hil Anderson. Providence/Barrington: Burning Deck/Lost Roads, 1998. 93 pp. ISBN: 1-886224-32-3.

   The review is printed with permission of the author, Charles Potts, President of Tsunami Inc., General Editor of The Temple, Gu Si, El Templo, in Walla Walla, Washington. Heart Into Soil is divided into two nearly equal parts, the first of poems written in China and the second of poems written since Xue Di's exile in America. He remains in the Freedom to write Program at Brown University, which rescued him from the turmoil surrounding his participation in the incidents at Tiananmen in 1989. There are amazing juxtapositions in the early poems, such as "The/ wolf in the fairy tale will die too, and the child do riffs/ on its teeth to go with the beautiful sounds of the road" from the poem "The Mushroom River," or "…my/ wife, like a tender red fox/ reaches her slender hand/ into my chest, full of music" from the poem "My Home." The lion's share of the first part is a series of poems taking as their trope the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh which have also been published in a separate book as Flames from Paradigm Press in Providence and due to be reprinted. While there is a certain amount of enforced similarity between Van Gogh's predicament and his artistic response to it and the oppression Xue Di endured in China, and the poems have a high degree of finish, they seem to be the work of a developing writer rather than one who has reached artistic maturity. At least the better poetry is in the second part of Heart Into Soil.Sprung from the nightmare of 1989 China, Xue Di said in an interview almost ten years later, "I can still see fires, people screaming, blood on the street." He seems to have adapted well, or as well as possible to a life in exile. In the poem "Homing" he writes: For the first time, I hold my head upIn that light I need no languageto express my gratitudeYouth has fully ripened, as fruitbodies out between pit and skinmy poems press out around my heartsimple and full of feelingholding the dreams and the laborof a life of pain He turns inside to his body and its inexhaustible storehouse of feelings. When he does turn outside as in a poem recalling a visit from his father to America, he relates "…you find/ all around you: the homeless rich." I doubt whether any poets native to the English language and America have noticed before how surrounded we are by "the homeless rich." Exile eyes give the poet power to see what is obscured from natives.It is in the poem "Forgive" where Xue Di expounds his raison d'etre. "I stand between crabbed youth and age. As if crossing a bridge/ I move along this pestilential century/ I know exactly what I'm doing." There is a confidence expressed in his inner unity that gets him right to the point: I've more important things to do in this lifeI need to study, to listen for the soul's instructionamid jeering crowds and unjust treatmentto lift life to a cleaner higher level It is exactly on this cleaner higher level, being prepared by Xue Di, that poetry and life can express its ultimate purpose. It is not in the multitude of distractions being dismissed in the poem before this declaration of purpose and it presents poets everywhere with a valid new standard. This new standard is even more compelling when speakers of English are ready to admit that Chinese civilization was already on a plane significantly freed from the tortuous Christian metaphysical crapola at least every other American poet still struggles with, the heaven/hell, sacred/profane dichotomies of uselessness, like kittens tumbling in a bag before they're drowned.Xue Di may have found love in his adopted land where it has recently been announced that he is the recipient of a $40,000 grant from the Joukowsky Foundation to continue his work at Brown for another two years. In "Nocturne on a New Theme" he explores the different ways love is regarded in Asia and the West with the metaphor of love as a car. "Westward our love moves, on/ four tires with a slow leak." Heart Into Soil belongs in the hands of every reader prepared to experience a new and deep way of responding to the world.

   Originally published at Asian American Press, April 11, 2003