Tower Built Downwards

Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024

Before and since his enforced exile from China in 1989, Yang Lian has been one of the most innovative and influential poets Chinese poets. Widely hailed in America and Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been translated into many languages. A Tower Built Downwards is the latest instalment of his poetry, written between 2019 and 2022. The different sections – short poems, sequences, and two long poems – form a single comprehensive statement of Yang’s recent explorations. It is rooted in his living experience of the historical retrogression of Hong Kong, the disaster of Covid-19, the global spiritual crisis, as well as his personal sadness at events such as the deaths of his father and brother.

The creativity of the writing faces – is even excited by – the depth of the challenges of reality. The long title poem in seven parts is a spiritual journey travelling back in time, completed back in the now, building up into 'a reincarnation within one', as endless time is transformed into multilayered poetical space, in Ai Weiwei’s words: 'This intellectual tower… [turns] the unsurpassable puzzles intermingled with life and death into an in-depth exploration of human emotion.'

The cover Ai Weiwei designed for Yang Lian features CCTV cameras and chains made of gold stretching around the whole book, across French flaps and then continuing inside the front and back covers, becoming an extraordinary visual metaphor for the book’s content.

‘Yang Lian’s A Tower Built Downwards, impeccably transported from the Chinese by Brian Holton, offers us a clear lens on the lived reality of a haunted world of exile and displacement. Steeped in classical Chinese poetry, with a spirited understanding of historical forces, Yang offers us elegy as a sublime art in a fallen world.’ – Judging panel, PEN Heaney Prize 2024

'In exile from China since 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Yang Lian is a writer of world significance; his admirers include Ai Weiwei, who designed the cover of his latest book. Its title evokes the exile’s backwards struggle to construct belonging. It also summarises Yang’s profound, distinctive verse, which clothes ideas and feelings with details from the lived world. Brilliantly translated by Brian Holton, this substantial collection revisits the poet’s personal China, particularly honouring his late father.' – Fiona Sampson, The Guardian (best recent poetry round-up)

‘To say that this book is ‘only’ political, would however be doing Yang Lian a massive disservice. The poems reference themselves, each other, and a myriad of elements, forming a Joycean web of intertextuality. A Tower Built Downwards is the transgression of language … Brian Holton’s translation is a masterpiece…’. – Jenny He, Modern Poetry in Translation

‘An ambitious and original collection that charts the poet’s emotional landscape and experience with exile, A Tower Built Downwards offers the reader a door to enter and experience the complexity and the ineradicable nature of memory, and the redeeming power of poetic dwelling and language.’ – Jennifer Wong, Under the Radar

‘At the heart of the collection is the long poem ‘A Tower Built Downwards’ from which the volume takes its title. It’s a sombre poem of great power, reprising many of the themes of Yang’s work.’ – Simon Collings, Long Poem Magazine

‘The fundamental ethos of A Tower Built Downwards is the dynamic power of memory which is a constant process of reinterpretation and reconstruction of the past in the present. Because of Yang Lian’s position of exile, new meanings affecting the psyche occur although meaning is rarely fixed in his poetry. [...] What is so striking is the boundlessness of his creativity, particularly the depth of his imagery. […] This is poetry at its finest.’ – Jennifer Langer, Exiled Ink Magazine

‘With an introduction and cover by Ai Weiwei, this is Yang Lian’s twelfth collection with his long-term translator, Brian Holton. An important poet of the Misty School (banned in China), his poems “grow in the direction of both life and death” (Ai Weiwei), dwelling on the pandemic in Wuhan and the erosion of democracy in Hong Kong. Containing poems rich in image and metaphor, this masterful translation won a PEN Translates award.’ – Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2023

'Those lonely Tang dynasty poets may be Yang’s original blues brothers, but he’s as much a modernist and symbolist in the vein of Mallarmé or Rimbaud […] Yang Lian’s work is rooted not in geography but in his own imagination […] to exist in Yang’s lines can be a gorgeous but frustrating adventure.' – Tim Kindseth, Time Magazine

Yang Lian was one of the original Misty Poets who reacted against the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. Born in Switzerland, the son of a diplomat, he grew up in Beijing and began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return he joined the influential literary magazine Jintian (Today). His work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. He was a Chinese poet in exile from 1989 to 1995, finally settling in London in 1997, also living for some periods in Berlin. Translations of his poetry include five collections with Bloodaxe, Where the Sea Stands Still (1999), Concentric Circles (2005), Lee Valley Poems (2009), Narrative Poem (2017) and A Tower Built Downwards (2023), as well as his long poem Yi (Green Integer, USA, 2002), Anniversary Snow (Shearsman, 2019), and Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections (Shearsman, 2008), a compilation of earlier work. He is co-editor with W.N. Herbert of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012). Both Where the Sea Stands Still and Narrative Poem were Poetry Book Society Recommended Translations. A Tower Built Downwards won an English PEN Award and is on the shortlist for the PEN Heaney Prize 2024. Yang Lian was awarded the International Nonino Prize in 2012 and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award in 2024.