Gao Zhanxiang, the author of this book, was once a great leader in Chinese culture field and now is Chairman of Chinese Culture Promotion Society. The Antiques in A New Era is a selected collection of the author’s poems composed over the years. In terms of the structural layout, it takes examples from the Book of Songs, the earliest collection of poems in China which consists of three sections, namely Feng (Airs of the States), Ya (Court Songs) and Song (Hymns). The Antiques in A New Era is composed of such four parts as “Hymns of Today”, “Song of A Hundred of Flowers”, "Love of Lotus” and “New Airs of the States” and includes three genres, namely modern style poetry, classical poetry and new airs of the states, detailed as follows:
In the section of “Hymns of Today”, there are many modern style poems, such as Smiling, Monument in the Fork, Hymns of Peace, Hymns of Spaceflights, Permanence of Mei Lanfang, which relate the life reality very nearly while bearing surrealist thinking with a facile tonal pattern and rhyme scheme in pristine, firm and elegant forms, leaving us with an endless aftertaste and affording for thoughts.
The “Song of A Hundred of Flowers” comprises 100 eight-line poems with seven characters to a line and a strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme made in an interesting new approach, representing flowers of 99 different styles. The poems are full of clever perceptions and profound moral while being composed in a plain style.
The “Love of Lotus” is a selected collection of the author’s four-line poems to the lotus with seven characters to a line and a strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme written over the years, full of words of wisdom and great verses. The author presents the neatness, grace and elegance of lotus of both being in motion and at rest in an uneven manner. Lotus in the poems is recognized as the most beautiful flora, presented to the truest extent and exclaimed to be with the best virtue.
As a new notion of poetry creation, the “New Airs of the States” is an inheritance of the spirit of “Airs of the States” formed for thousands of years, expressing the earnest perception of contemporary life in the traditional style loved by the mass population from the viewpoint of the populace and pursuing the artistic effects of being explicit and perspicuous while being full of profound implications and thoughts. The Antiques in A New Era contains hundreds of works written in the form of “New Airs of the States” by Minister Gao Zhanxiang, such as Blind Dates with Loyalty, Success and Failure, Diligence and Indolence, Flowers on the Mountain, Ode to Cattles, Timely Rain after Long Drought and so on, composed with unselfconscious wording in a precise and strict tonal pattern and rhyme scheme. Deep-felt life perceptions and feelings are integrated into the works which contain vivid tropes and symbolizations and reveal abundant experiences and connotations of life in plainness.
Poetry created by Gao ZhanXiang is free from loaded rhetoric words and sentences but full of the author’s sincerity and frankness to art; it is devoid of affected sentimentality but full of the author’s love of and ode to life; it is free of coy circumbendibus but full of the author’s glorification to and admiration for the motherland. Poetry made by Gao Zhanxiang shows a perfect combination of elegance and popularity, which can be rated as its most significant feature.
The appendix of the Antiques in A New Era also incorporates 145 pieces of selected poetics written by the author, which are short and pithy, straight and profound. The author holds that poetry is not an aristocratic culture but a popular art, and only when poetical works loved by the populace are composed, can there be an opportunity for real renaissance of Chinese poetry. |
