Another Rendez-Vous

This book is a follow-up to the author’s previous Peter Lang book, The Rendez-Vous: Poems of Multicultural Experience (2003). The new book contains recent poetry and prose by Andrew Parkin, together with the prefaces to two new longer poems. The Gourds is based on a collection of small Chinese gourds etched to depict scenes from literature and legend. Star of a Hundred Years is a dramatic ode dedicated to the father of Hong Kong cinema, Sir Run Run Shaw, who is more than one hundred years old and whose lifetime coincides with the history of film. The ode is thus cast in the form of a film scenario; this creates a scenariode, a new sub-genre of verse. There are also lyrics and prose poems as well as fiction, all involving cross-cultural experience found in a variety of places in different countries. A sequence of «flashes» reveals the past as not only another country but also another culture, contrasting with our contemporary lives in certain ways. The mixture of genres and the way they contrast with one another reflect at times the post-modern moment in literature. And again, in the continuum and fragmented flashes of memory, it becomes evident that many of us now live as international and trans-cultural people.

Andrew Parkin, a poet-critic, is known for many books and articles dealing mainly with drama and theater. His works include The Dramatic Imagination of W.B. Yeats, Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault, an edition of Yeats’s ?The herne’s Egg?, and most recently ?At the Hawk’s Well? and ?The Cat and the Moon? Manuscript Materials by W.B. Yeats edited by Andrew Parkin. With K.K. Tam and Terry Yip he edited Shakespeare Global/Local: The Hong Kong Imaginary in Transcultural Production. He was founding editor of The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and is an Honorary Life Member of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, an Honorary Adviser to the Chinese Academy of Social Science and to the Chinese Canadian Writers’ Association. His poems and some short stories have appeared in a variety of journals. He has previously published six collections of his original poetry. He retired as Professor Emeritus from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is an Honorary Senior Tutor of Shaw College there, and spends much of his time writing in Paris and Vancouver.