Sidetracks

Sidetracks, Bei Daos first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poets first long poem and his magnum opusthe artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. As a poet, I am always lost, Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poets wandering lifefrom his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the years of exile living in six countries, back to the rural construction site where he worked during the Cultural Revolution, to the sunshine tablecloth in his kitchen in Davis, California, and his emotional visit home after a thirteen-year separation (the mother tongue has deepened my foreignness). All the various currents of our times rush into his lifelines, reconfigured through the vortex of experience and the poets encounters with friends and strangers, artists and ghosts, as he moves from place to place, unable to return home. As the poet Michael Palmer has noted, Bei Daos work, in its rapid transitions, abrupt juxtapositions, and frequent recurrence to open syntax evokes the un-speakability of the exiles condition. It is a poetry of explosive convergences, of submersions and unfixed boundaries, amid languages.