Black Stars

War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems.” -MAXINE HONG KINGSTONCo-translated by Vietnamese poet Ngo Tu Lap and American poet Martha Collins, this moving collection introduces a man who is both attached to his war-haunted childhood home and deeply conversant with contemporary global life. Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, Black Stars escapes the confines of time and space, suffusing image with memory, abstraction with meaning, and darkness with abundant light.Underlying tensions animate these arresting poems by Ngo Tu Lap, movingly translated by Martha Collins. Co-inhabiting past and present, the speaker conflates absence and presence so that 'On the finger of a woman who died young / A ring still sparkles / In the depths of the black earth.' Inside this dual perspective, we, as readers, are enriched.” -ARTHUR SZEReading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me-nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. The French called PTSD nostalgie. I feel gratitude too.” -MAXINE HONG KINGSTONA light flickers in and among the shadows and darkness we find in Ngo Tu Lap's poetry. This light is ineffable, and yet utterly present. As Lap writes, it is like 'the whispered call of a star at the edge of the sky.' In these vivid and moving translations, Ngo Tu Lap's poems come to us with the light of his own whispered calls from afar.” -FRED MARCHANTNGO TU LAP has published three collections of poems in Vietnam, as well as five works of fiction, five collections of essays, and many translations from Russian, French, and English. He is currently Dean of the Department of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Economics at the International School (Vietnam National University) in Hanoi.MARTHA COLLINS is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Blue Front and White Papers, as well as two collections of poems co-translated from the Vietnamese. Currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and an editor for Oberlin College Press, Collins lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cover design by Charles Rue Woods Cover photo © Yves Schiepek