Shuo Yuan
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Luminous Book: A Review of Maura High’s The Garden of Persuasions by Angele Ellis
The Garden of Persuasions by Maura High Jacar Press 2013 Reviewed by Angele Ellis Maura High’s life and work have brought her from Wales to Nigeria and North Carolina, but her poems focus on ordinary, if intense, moments that reflect her interest in Asian poetry and Zen Buddhism. For example, High merges the commonplace incident of a bird’s fatal flight into a picture window with the infinity of disappearance, as of human airplane passengers, in “Exemplary Statements, with Meanings and Annotations.” This small death provides a glimpse into a great mystery: …A bead of blood leaking from its beak To be flying in that blue and then suddenly to be going (we say, as if there were some place to go to) and then gone Each poem’s title in The Garden of Persuasions (winner of the Jacar Press 2013 Chapbook Contest) is taken from a bibliography of ancient Chinese works and commentaries. In fact, the book’s title poem bears the name of a story collection compiled during the Han Dynasty (1st century BCE). Along with the brushstrokes of the cherry tree branches in Jinxiu Alice Zhao’s cover illustration and the four ideographs that translate the title page, this decision underscores High’s subtle yet rich artistic technique. High’s repeated use of brief lines—three to seven syllables—and her strong relationship to nature make her images as vivid as haiku. Her juxtaposition of short lines with longer lines in couplets, tercets, and one-line stanzas, as well as her frequent omission of punctuation brings an almost breathless tension to such poems as “Grand Mystery, with Collected Commentaries,” in which the reader feels as much as sees a snake’s entrance into water. As High describes the scene, it is almost as if the reader has become the alien creature: A long brown snake scribbled downslope and slipped into the water without a splash The pond sealed over as if nothing had happened but something did happen… Even when High’s imagination travels to Ghana, inspired by an artist who makes works from ocean debris, her female beachcomber remains aloof and solitary, caught in the act of gathering essential to any form of creation. In “New Account of Tales of the World,” the artist’s movements become a dance set to an inaudible tune: …but hers is a private music—you see it in her gait and how she bends and turns and when she stops to pluck at the strings of a net… In more than one poem, High seamlessly shifts her attention to the inner world of a child, observed with precise detail—as for example, during the classes that High teaches when she isn’t writing. In “Writings for Elementary Instruction, two young students have very different responses to the national suicide prevention program To Write Love on Her Hands, which gives High a beautiful opportunity to play with her classic sensibility in contemporary time. The speaker attends to her task as the children do to theirs: The boy wrote in cursive inside the penciled outline of his hand Pittsburgh Steelers and looks over to his sister who is copying the word LOVE backward inside her smaller hand … her word, in a space she chooses among the other hands on the poster as a gardener slips in a flower and tamps the earth around it This fragile flower of love is transformed into a riot of weeds in the chapbook’s title poem. High finds both lushness and stubborn humanity in “…sorrell and chickweed / moss, bluets, onion grass… their arguments as manifold as ours / as stemmed and rooted.” With delicate irony (“…They seem harmless, a gift / from some time before Eden”) she unfolds their glorious—or insidious—tenacity: …it can take years for one to make its point to seed or spread by root or spore or runner, to crowd or shade out competitors a garden cultivating itself The parallels that High draws between the flawed natural world and the flawed human world become strikingly interchangeable in High’s “Luminous Book,” in which the essence of dying autumn leaves seems to enter the speaker’s library and mingles with the pages of her volumes. As she describes the moment: The leaves stop breathing and turn the colors of clay, casting a russet light across the room on all my books, their lacunae, errors, subplots ramifying in all directions … Here—as elsewhere in The Garden of Persuasions—High’s poetic concentration creates a charged and mystical space. To read Maura High’s work with the careful attention it deserves is to enter a world in which every object is sacred, and to feel, with the speaker, a holy awe at the power inherent in the simple act of handling a book. High ends “Luminous Book” on a note of meditative exhilaration: …I could take down any one at random and open it, and bow to the light emitted by its pages
Shuo Yuan
Shuo Yuan was compiled by Liu Xiang of West Han Dynasty. Liu Xiang collated and arranged sundries of Shuo Yuan collected by the royal of the West Han Dynasty, and added more than 100 thousand words including 20 discourses and 748 chapters with the name of Shuo Yuan. Original book contains 20 volumes and the existing was reduced to 5 volumes with the majority being lost. They were later collected by Zeng Gong of Song Dynasty and restored to 20 volumes. Shuo Yuan covers lost news and old stories from ancient time to Han Dynasty by classification, together with argumentations to publicize political thoughts and ethics morality of Confucianism. Shuo Yuan is an important reference literature mainly about proverbs and epigrams with profound philosophy. It features the satire-implying and story-oriented narration.
Shuoyuan 說苑 "The Garden of Persuasions"
The Shuoyuan 說苑 "Garden of persuasions" is a collection of short stories of persons from antiquity to the Former Han period 前漢 (206 BCE-8 CE). It was compiled by the imperial librarian Liu Xiang 劉�000he original name of the book was Xinyuan 新苑 "New garden", and it contained 748 stories in 20 chapters. The stories center on Confucian scholars and other persons belonging to philosophical schools or political advisors. They are arranged according to the theme of discussion, from the relationship between ruler and minister, estimating worthies and competent counsellors, to plans for strengthening the state and government or how to conquer inimical territory. The largest part of the stories are dialogues between an advisor and a ruler. A lot of them are also preserved in other books, like the Guoyu 國語 and Zhanguoce �000� but there are also some stories not to be found there. 16 stories are from the Han period, all others from the Warring States period �000(5th cent-221 BCE). The book was originally and is still classified as a Confucian treatise, but the literary critic Liu Xie 劉勰 from the Southern Dynasties period 南朝 (420~589), writing the Wenxin diaolong 文心�000�interpreted the stories as of more literary character. It was therefore often classified as collection of short stories in later ages, inspite of its historiographical content. The stories were so famous that a lot of later authors quote from the Shuoyuan. The imperial bibliography Jingjizhi 經籍志 of the official dynastic history Suishu 隋書 speaks of a length of 20 juan "scrolls", the two books Jiutangshu 舊唐書 and Xintangshu 新唐書 of 30 chapters. The last version might include the 10 juan long supplement Xu Shuoyuan 續說苑, which was written by Liu Kuang 劉貺 from the Tang period 唐 (618-907). During the Song period 宋 (960-1279) the original was already lost, but the scholar Zeng Gong 曾鞏 was able to reconstruct most of it by extracting quotations in other books. His reconstruction is 20 juan long and includes 678 stories. This is the received version. The Shuoyuan is included in the collectanea Han-Wei congshu 漢魏叢書, Siku quanshu 四庫全書, Baizi quanshu 百子全書, Sibu congkan 四部叢刊, Congshu jicheng 叢書集成, and Sibu beiyao 四部備要. The edition in the Sibu congkan has been reprinted by the Shanghai guji chubanshe 上海古籍�000�in 1990. There are modern commentaries written by Zhao Shanyi 趙善詒 (Shuoyuan shuzheng 說苑疏證) and by Liu Wendian 劉文典 (Shuoyuan jiaobu 說苑斠補). Sources: Liu Zhaoyun 劉兆雲 (1991). "Shuoyuan 說苑", in: Zhongguo wenxue da cidian 中國文學�000� vol. 6, p. 4577. Ed. Ma Liangchun 春, Li Futian 李福田. Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe. Zhao Hankun 趙含坤 (2005). Zhongguo leishu 中國類書, p. 22. Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe.
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1 In many cases multiple versions of the same story are included, making Shuo Yuan a valuable source for the study of early texts.
2 The Shuo Yuan (Chinese: 說苑), is a collection of stories and anecdotes from the pre-Qin period (先秦) to the Western Han Dynasty.
3 The stories in the Shuo Yuan were compiled and annotated by the Confucian scholar Liu Xiang.