"A delightful aspect of My Da's poetry—indeed, perhaps the hallmark of Vietnamese writing—is the surprising way it summons human feeling from the ancient landscape, from river and field, from fruit and fragrant tree, culling a contemporary self from timeless images. In carrying this across into English, My Da could not have found better translators than Thuy Dinh and Martha Collins, a poet who has studied Vietnamese, carefully listening to its music." —John Balaban
"Green Rice is a selection from five books of Lam Thi My Da's poetry. As the years go by, the images of war recede. Green rice grows, apple trees grow, first love blooms, children are born. Women grow old, and the poet marvels...I am grateful to the poet for guiding me to hard-won age and spring, and forgiveness."—Maxine Hong Kingston
"Behind the seemingly simple exterior is the delicate tension between Buddhist patience and contemporary anxiety, between quiet sadness and unabashed joy, between the agrarian past and the urban present, between ancient song and modern free-verse lyric, between family and history, between self and nation... The best poems in this collection sound remarkably fresh and nuanced and surprisingly transcendent.”—Marilyn Chin
"The poems...are both accessible and subtle, evoking a sense of timelessness and renewal that lingers more profoundly than nostalgia, grief, joy or hope."—Multicultural Review
"Martha Collins and Dinh Thuy have done the best job one can expect. To carry out the project, they studied thoroughly not only the texts and their contexts, but also Vietnamese traditional culture and poetic forms. Dinh Thuy is a perfect bilingual writer, and Martha Collins has studied Vietnamese. Working closely with each other, their diligence makes the translation sound as natural as if they were written directly in English. To some extent, one can think of these wonderful English versions as second originals."—Pleiades
"Lam Thi My Da may have grown up with war and its effects, but she has found a way to express her eternal hope."—New Pages Book Review
"One cannot be transported into Lam Thi My Da's world of jungle, whether pre-war, wartime, or postwar life in Viet Nam, withouth becoming verbally intoxicated. There is an elevating, moving sensation we feel from My Da's deft frankness of her perceptions..."—ARTIS, Real Change Editorial Committee
"Both traditional Asian and familiar Western elements are contained in Lam Thi's poems showing how the ordinary is inflected—but not mutated, obscured, or erased—by events, no matter how tragic or repressive. The ordinary, not only ordinary acts, but also ordinary yearnings, shine out of this poetry on the Vietnam War, the secondary status of women in the society, and other historical and cultural subjects and themes of her country."—Midwest Book Review
Green Rice, like Lam Thi My Da's writing career itself, begins in what Americans call the Vietnam War. While her poetry reflects the cost of the war, her poems are grounded in her intimate involvement with the landscape, flora, and fauna of her country, as well as lyrics that explore love, motherhood, women’s issues, and the sometimes-difficult movement into middle age.
For more information about Martha Collins, please visit her web site at: http://marthacollinspoet.com
For a review of Green Rice by Stacee-Lynn Helms please visit Chaos Amidst Beauty
|
