KIT FAN

What do we know but that we face
One another in this place?
– W. B. Yeats, 'Man and the Echo'

HK. I loved my mountains, rivers, and trees
long before towers and families, but if the only way
the sea can speak to the hills is through the moon
I will speak to you from the ink-dark
about the changing tides, the slow equivocal pain
of transition, how things are moving away
from the norm, the deceptive comfort
of a norm, the fading neon noises
on Mong Kok streets, the kind of blue and yellow
you’ll only find in my heart, the Lion Rock spirit
and the endangered species named after me:
the grouper, cascade frog, incense tree.

Echo. What do we know but that?

HK. What’s the meaning of life in numbers?
Although I count every second of mine
I remember nothing of those Crown-
appointed governors come and gone who said
nothing, did nothing, changed nothing.
What are the promises in a red flag with five stars
shooting out from one bauhinia?
Twenty-two moon-calendars since I was re-unorphaned
I stray and obey like a tree, half-crown, half-root,
branching out and bedding in, each growth year
a scar tissue erased by the smudges
of shared stocks, fireworks, new railways and bridges.

Echo. We face one another? We face one another?

HK. What am I but the high-rise windows
reflecting the sun and the lives below?
Come, look into every single one
and find millions of homemade voices in an impasse,
in fissures, in boxlike existences
where one language is never enough.
High above I see black kites, sometimes white-bell
sea eagles gliding between glass and cliff,
drones and signals, eyeing the quick chance
while larks, thrushes, and titmice are twittering
in bamboo cages, bird to bird, sharing
the captive sky with their distant counterparts
as one sun drops under the horizon
and a different one rises.

Echo. In this place? In this place? In this place?

(Published in World Literature Today, April 2019 issue)

for Ziad Elmarsafy

Months have passed and we have seen enough of death

this winter that even though seeing these chlorophyll

green leaves suckle on the sun again and tower over Russell Square

broadcasting C’est la vie on this one June day aren’t enough

for the sea-deaths, land-deaths and air-deaths un-extinguishing

somewhere else, not yet out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Not yet here too,

this corner kingdom we’ve elected to live within still seemingly

prospers like the summer holm-oak by the Hotel Russell

you’ll come to frequent in your new life in the capital.

People lazing about in the sun as in La Grande Jatte, children shrieking

in the fountain, a father carrying his bum-bare boy on his shoulders,

an old couple walking past, catching our eye, still walking

past. So many of us, I want to know every single life, what

brought them here today, who they are, and how long they will live.

We all have it, living it, re-living it, shaping this one-off malleable

thing over and over that even though all winter we’ve seen

what could happen to it, we still sit on the bench among the perishable

green, chattering about it as if it won’t leave us just like that.

(Published in the anthology Wretched Stranger (Boiler House Press, 2018) which commemorates the anniversary of the June 2016 EU Referendum and in solidarity through struggles ongoing and to come. Proceeds of the book will be donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees.)

Hokkaido, Poetry

Hong Kong and the Echo, World Literature Today

Vitreous Humour, The Poetry Review

The Painted Skin, The Poetry Review

June, by Bei Dao, Modern Poetry in Translation

The Burning of Books, Prairie Schooner

Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost, Soanyway

From The Bostonians, The Compass Magazine

Among School Teachers, Lacuna

Late, Poetry Book Society

Mother's Ink, Cha

To the Shadow-Millions, Cha

How Cangjie Invented Chinese Characters, Cha

Lines from "Another Poem of Insomnia", Cha

Ghost Letter, Cha

"Chinese Poetry" (in translation), Cha

• Review of Shane McCrae's Sometimes I Never Suffered (Corsair) and J.O. Morgan's The Martian's Regress (Cape). The Poetry Review (Spring 2021).
• Review of Alice Oswald's Noboby (Faber and W.W. Norton), POETRY (July/August 2020).
• Review of Nguyễn Du's The Song of Kiều (Penguin), translated by Timothy Allen. The Poetry Review (Autumn 2019).
• Review of Rachael Allen's Kingdomland (Faber) and Emily Hasler's The Built Environment (Pavilion). The Poetry Review (Spring 2019).
• Review of Robin Robertson's The Long Take (Picador) and David Harsent's Salt (Faber). The Poetry Review (Summer 2018).
• Review of Thom Gunn's Selected Poems (Faber), edited by Clive Wilmer. The Poetry Review (Winter 2017).
• Review of Jorie Graham's Fast (Carcanet) and Pauline Stainer's Sleeping Under the Juniper Tree (Bloodaxe). The Poetry Review (Autumn 2017).
• Review of Patrick McGuinness's Jilted City (Carcanet), John Ash's In the Wake of the Day (Carcanet), Kwame Dawes's Back of Mount Peace (Peepal Tree), and Richard Gwyn's Sad Giraffe Café (Arc). Poetry Review (Autumn 2010).
• Review of Clive James's Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003-2008 (Picador) and John Kinsella's Comus: A Dialogic Mask (Arc). Poetry Review (Spring 2009).
• Review of Simon Armitage's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Faber), Sean O’Brien's Inferno: A Verse Translation (Picador), and Louise Glück's Averno (Carcanet). Poetry Review (Summer 2007).
• Review of Chase Twichell's Dog Language (Bloodaxe), Elizabeth Alexander's American Blue: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe), and Tomaž Šalamun's Row (Arc). Poetry Review (Autumn 2006).

• Kit Fan (2015). Sinead Morrissey. In Jay Parini (ed.), British Writers. Retrospective Supplement III. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• Kit Fan (2000). Thom Gunn. In Jay Parini (ed.), British Writers. Supplement XXI. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons.

• Kit Fan, "'Between the blank page and the poem': Reading Simone Weil in Contemporary American Poets, The Cambridge Quarterly 36:2 (2007), pp. 129-154.
• Kit Fan, "Imagined Places: Robinson Crusoe and Elizabeth Bishop", Biography 28:1 (Winter 2005) pp. 43-53.