David Hinton (1) (1954–)

Summer 2018, Netgalley ARC:

Thank you to David Hinton, Shambhala Publications, Inc., and NetGalley for this advanced copy of “Desert: Poems” for an honest review.

I was very interested when it was announced that David Hilton, the highly lauded translator of Chinese classics, would be producing his own book of poetry. I think open this book I expected it to be a collection of poems, but very quickly I found myself in a landscape of a desert that was epic more than snippets.

It reminded me of the great old epics and ballads. This is a land influence and referential to Homer, and Whitman, and the Chinese Classics that are his background. It’s a journey through sky, and sand, and parchedness, as well as the human mind, heart, and soul. I will definitely be buying copies of this for my poet friends.… (mais)

I feel bad giving this only 2.5 stars because I feel like there's a lot here and the premise (that Ch'an, normally simply considered as a predecessor to Japanese Zen, has a more complicated history of a merging with Taoism and then a tearing down of elements to create something new) is very interesting, but I think I'm just not far along enough in my practice and research to properly follow the thread.

I also found myself annoyed at certain decisions made in the structuring of the book, such as using English translations of names rather than the names themselves. Reading about someone named "Sudden-Horse Way-Entire" rather than "Mazu Daoyi" or "Yellow-Bitterroot Mountain" rather than "Huangbo" is more distracting to me than helpful. (I also find myself unreasonably annoyed by the over-hyphenization of concepts with terms like "dark-enigma," "existence-tissue," and "rivers-and-mountains-landscape." Of course, this particular phenomneon is not specific to this book.)

I guess the long and short of it is that I was in over my head with this one, despite finding the premise intriguing.… (mais)