Savage Charm

SAVAGE CHARM is autobiographical at its core, but also unsentimental, unapologetic, and rigorous in its exploration of such related concepts as self-knowledge, fictional identity, the city, the writing of exile, belief, religion, and the modern subject. The poet brings his distinctive voice to cosmopolitan Hong Kong's English poetic scene with this volume which records his personal experience of the city in the subtlest of ways. Though deeply personal, the poems have a gutsy impersonal touch and a distinctive social tinge. Savage charm is both poetic and philosophical."What emerges in this collection is that poetry cannot be one thing; there is an astonishing play of rhythms, rhymes, and half-rhymes, different metres and half-metres, different lengths of poem, and different forms, so that anyone coming to them will be impressed by writing which does not settle down into one thing, but which ranges and experiments, its English, punning and playful, being neither conventionally poetic, nor allowing the reader to relax: everything here demands the sharpest attention."-Jeremy Tambling, Professor of English, Warsaw University of Social Sciences and Humanities