The brief general introduction, though, interestingly opts to stress Taiwan's diversity and concludes that immigration has been the society's hallmark. As a result of immigration, the culture is both varied and has wide international ramifications.
For the rest, there are interviews with three well-established poets of the older generation, but after that we are on our own, and have to rely on a small handful of poems from each of 18 practitioners.
Judged by these alone there are great riches to be found. For what it's worth -- and remember these are all translations, none by the poets -- the writers who struck me most were the blind Paiwan poet Monaneng with his ringing rhetoric full of the imagery of mountain and ocean; the Hualien poet Chen Kenhua; the ecological protests of Wu Sheng; Li Jinwen especially in his sardonic poem "The Reporter"; the Atayal poet Walis Nokan; and Chen Li, also a native of Hualien. But it's impossible to tell.
In addition, this publication contains four short stories from Vietnam (an excellent one reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway by Phan Trieu Hai), some black-and-white photos of a Hawaiian theater group called Iona Contemporary Dance Theatre, a complete play by a fourth-generation New Zealander of Chinese ancestry, and a story from the Philippines. It also has some reviews of books by more mainstream writers, notably Rohinton Mistry, Carol Shields, Huraki Murakami and Tim Winton.
In conclusion, we must rely on the judgment of Arthur Sze, one of the book's three editors, which has implications beyond the world of poetry. "Some of the best modern Chinese poetry comes from Taiwan," he writes, "and the evolution of modern Taiwanese poetry is the story of how the periphery has transformed itself into the frontier."
In contemporary Taiwan, one of the editors proclaims, "cohesion and difference are not in opposition."
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