Anna Yin, Seven Nights With The Chinese Zodiac (Black Moss Press, 2015).
Anna Yin is the First Poet Laureate (2015-2017) of Mississauga in Ontario.
Seven Nights With The Chinese Zodiac is Anna Yin at her maturing best. Each poem, like a portal, invites the reader into another sphere and dimension, but the journey to such places illuminates, in an evocative way, the world of matter and history, the flux and thinness of secular time.
Seven Nights With the Chinese Zodiac is thoughtfully divided into four sections: Night Shades, Dried Roses, Life Jars and The Self-Completing Tree. Each of the poetic missives has its own discrete and uncanny message built within a variety of subtle metaphors.
Yin has a unique way of weaving together on the loom of her poetic vision the layered wealth of Chinese thought and culture with the probing demands of Canadian and American poetic visionaries--rare is such a combination and genius. But, there is yet a fuller synthesis. Poets and painters are called forth, in an even more cosmopolitan manner, to inform and shape the literary life of Anna Yin: Dante, Akhmatova, Van Gogh, Burns, Borges, Basho and Yeats step forward on the stage of Anna’s poetic oeuvre and speak, suggestively and wisely, of deeper and more demanding truths.
The seasons and their scents and sensibilities speak with a voice not to be missed in this compact poetic beauty, also. Each meditative read of Seven Nights With the Chinese Zodiac reveals more and more about the human journey and the longing of the human soul, midst many competing and conflicting desires, for deeper meaning and a fuller life.
The best way to fully appreciate this newest poetic gift and offering of Anna Yin is to sit quietly with a poem each day and inwardly digest its suggestive and invitational purpose. The multi-coloured mythic creature that adorns the front cover was wisely chosen as an entrée to this burnished gold book of poetry that welcomes messages from such diverse yet needful places.
Ron Dart
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