Wild Geese Returning

Download or read book Wild Geese Returning written by Mich?le M?tail and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The genre of poems that may be read both forward and backward, producing different creations was known as the "flight of wild geese." These poems were often sent so that a distant lover, like the migrating birds, would return. Its greatest practitioner, and the focus of this critical anthology, is Su Hui, a woman who, in the 4th Century, embroidered a silk for her distant husband using a grid of 840 characters that created perhaps 12,000 ways to read this poem. With examples from the 3rd to the 19th centuries, Michele Metail describes reversible poems as "a singular adventure at the edge of meaning, of language, and of writing."