The Poetry of Pollution in Qui Xiaolong's Fiction

I seldom read poetry but I have enjoyed the poems in the Inspector Chen series by Qiu Xiaolong. They provide images and rhythms rarely encountered into crime fiction. Beyond Chen and Adam Dagleish in the books of P.D. James I cannot recall having read books with sleuths who were also poets.

In the early books of the Chen series I recall poems associated with relationships or pastoral scenes. I remember grand vistas and potent emotions.

In Don’t Cry, Tai Lake, which I reviewed in my last post, there are quotations from classic Chinese poetry. In a moment of melancholy Chen recalls lines from Su Shi of the Song dynasty:

It is nothing but a dream, / for the past, for the present. / Whoever wakes out of the dream? / There is only a never-ending cycle of old joy, and new grief. / Someday, someone else, / in view of the tower at night, / may sigh deeply for me.

But Chen’s poetry does not live in the past. He provides current imagery in his poetry when he thinks of the lovely Shanshan and their developing relationship and her efforts against fierce opposition to save Tai Lake:

          In a trance of blazing poppies

          or in the cooling shade, deeply covered

          with moss, you have forgotten

the night we spent on the bridge,

beyond them converging

into music on your retina, while

you conducted with your cigarette

a tone poem of the sleepless lake,

when you no longer belonged

to a place, nor a time, nor yourself.

When another white water bird flies

from the calendar, may you dream

no longer of a pale oyster

clinging to the grim limestone.

(Where are you now, as dawn taps

at my window with her rosy fingers,

as the fragrance of coffee and bread

penetrates the wakening mind,

and as the door, like a smile,

welcomes flowers and newspapers?)

His poetry becomes powerful when he turns to contemporary industry. What startled me and stayed with me was Chen’s poetry describing pollution:

The morning comes to the lake

in waves of toxic waste, waves

of poisonous air, surging to smother

the smile in the waking boughs.

she walks in a red jacket

like a bright sail through the dust

under the network of pipes, long

in disrepair, spreading cobweblike,

dripping with contaminated water.

…..

The broken metal-blue fingernails

of the leaves clutching

the barren bank of the lake,

the dead fish afloat, shining

with the mercury bellies trembling,

their glassy eyes still flashing

with the last horror and fascination

…..

Soon, the spring is departing again.

How much more of wind and rain

can it really endure? Only the cobweb

still cares, trying to catch

a touch of fading memory.

Why is the door always covered

in the dust of doubts?

The lake cries, staring

at the silent splendid sun.

I should not have been surprised as I was at the power of modern images.

The only book of poetry I have reviewed on this blog is Anthem for Doomed Youth, an anthology of World War I poetry, by participants in the Great War. I found those poems powerful and moving. Several describe the modern mechanical efficiency of killing.

John Hobson closes his poem The Machine Gun:

Here do I lie,

                 Hidden by grass and flowers,

            With my machine-gun,

           Ghost of modern war.

           The sun floats high,

        The moon through deep blue hours,

I watch with my machine-gun

At Death’s grim door.

There is insight into modern life through poems that is beyond what prose can tell us.

****

Xiaolong, Qiu – (2009) - Death of a Red Heroine (Second best of 2009 fiction); (2011) - "X" is for Qui Xiaolong; (2011) - A Case for Two Cities; (2012) - "X" is for Qiu Xiaolong Again; (2012) - A Loyal Character Dancer; (2013) - Red Mandarin Dress and Reflections on red Mandarin dresses; (2015) - The Mao Case;  (2016) - Don't Cry, Tai Lake