The boundaries of poetry in English are expanded with Contemporary Korean Poetry, the first major scholarly anthology introducing twentieth century Korean poetry in English. In translating 181 poems by 140 poets, Ko Won manages to capture the feeling and mood of the original work, retaining the intended simplicity for effect.
“When Ko Won writes a poem, ‘the lamplight grows under my skin / till facing midnight,’ he speaks as a man who knows midnight as well as a child knows his own room. He experienced war in both North and South Korea. As a poet and as a person, he has a shrewd sense of Korean verse from the past decades, of the luck and pain out of which it was written. He also has a fine feeling toward the shape of a poem in English. Yi Chang-ūi wrote that he felt green spring in a cat’s whiskers. We feel it also in these poems.”—Paul Engle, cofounder, the International Writing Program, University of Iowa
