China Beats by Sibyl James

Description—

In China Beats, Sibyl James captures for an American audience not only her experiences in China, but “a sense of the culture, daily life and history—the deeper rhythms of [China’s] heart. Things that would help U.S. readers better understand where the country had been and where it was going,” says James. A self-proclaimed political leftist, her vision of China is that of an American feminist who both plays with and reveres the culture as it modifies and adapts its ancient face. Her visit to China in 1985-86 happened because she answered an ad seeking “Foreign Experts” from the Chinese Ministry of Education. Her teaching assignment at the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade was an adventure full of frustrations, mysteries, and serendipities. Many things in China have changed since then, but certain fundamentals remain.

Comments—

“Traveling through China with Sibyl James’ poems as a guidebook is like getting a seat on Merle Haggard’s tour bus with Richard Hugo as tour guide. A lonely singer laments about equally forlorn people and places whose sadness and poverty are not for want of loveliness or humor, but for the lost possibilities that the poems name.”

—Emily Warn
The Novice Insomiac
Copper Canyon Press

"Of those American poets who have written movingly of China while traveling and/or teaching there, none have written funnier lyrics than Sibyl James in her collection China Beats. James' poems are not the offhanded impressionist postcards of a writer abroad, but poems that in their depth of feeling, tautly tuned music, and keenness of detail, touch to the quick of Chinese culture."

—Michael O'Connor
When the Tiger Weeps
Pleasure Boat Studio

Letter to Emily, from Suzhou

It's raining, but the stores
have no walls on the street front
so everything spills out and stops me.
I watch a man curl white dough,
shiny with oil, in a wide pan,
then wind the skein around his fingers,
pass it to a woman with two tongs.
She twists the dough in hot fat.
Another woman stacks them
on old papers. They sell
before the oil cools into rain.

I want to be a hand inside this rhythm.
I want to go back to Zhenjiang,
to the green and yellow pattern
of the rice fields, cut to dry.
Then the line of bound sheaves
queued up to the road
where people spread them, let wheels
do half the threshing.
Cleared spaces in the fields,
with grain swept into mounds,
the rakes stir chaff like river mist
against the late sun.

You told me once it's hard work,
making the gods live again.
You meant poetry, the sounds we gather
into meaning. But the gods
are better dead. I want to mean two hands
beating in this work of common hands.

—Sibyl James