February’s Rose--- New Book Release (NBR) article

http://quillandparchment.com/archives/July2022/new3.html


February’s Rose
by Bing Hua
Translation by Yingcai Xu
100 poems ~ 140 pages
Format: 6’’ x 9” ~ Perfect Bound
Price: $19.99
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
ISBN: ISBN-10: 1646627822
           ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-1646627820
To Order: Amazon


ABOUT THE BOOK:


Bing Hua is the “Queen of Love Poetry” and an award-winning poet. Bing Hua ’s poems center on lauding the love of life and the beauty of affection. With remarkable poetic lines, she has created vital and extraordinary artistic realms. Thus, in her way of sentiment, language, and rhythm, she has freely and fully instilled the female’s tender, warm, and affectionate feelings into the deep souls of her readers. She meticulously cultivates fragrant roses by a creek, in a garden, or even in the field of her whole life. In this, she also cultivates beauty.

She integrates her whole heart into nature to directly communicate with nature and submerge herself in the orderly and unorderly boundless firmament. Her poetry is indeed commendable. It is a unique and culture-rich life experience and mental enlightenment.


ADVANCE PRAISE:


Bing Hua is an outstanding poet who pursues a unique aesthetic value and is a rose that blooms alone in the time of moribund poetry writing. What a surprising miracle!
–Liu Huangtian, former President of Chinese Literature & Art Association in America

I like Bing Hua's poetry, simple, yet full of feelings. Mr. Xu Yingcai's translation is also quite commendable for the accuracy, individuality, and cohesion he has achieved！Bing Hua is good at allegorizing subtle intricacies and tender sentiments through scenes in the nature to express her feelings.
–William Marr, former President of Illinois State Poetry Society

Bing Hua's ecstatic poetry of love invites the reader to experience the many faces of love-love expressed in the seasons, in the gravity of a door, in the heartbreak of the girl who "Turns away from the splendor of rainbows" (This Girl). Read these poems and be moved by the enduring, and sometimes wrenching, power of love.
–Sylvia Cavanaugh, English language Editor for Poetry Hall

"Startled", you may discover "The Light of Poetry" in Bing Hua's poems on "Love" and "Waiting" and "Promise". They can help change your "Mood" in "Setback" and get rid of "The Sorrow of Blue" or some "Haunting Thoughts". Hopefully they could lead you through "That Door" to see "Dancing" "Mayflowers" and hear the "Sound of Silence".
– Zhu Xiao Di, author of Tales of Judge Dee


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Bing Hua is the pen name of Lihua Lu, who is also known as Rose Lu. She is an accountant in Maryland, vice president of the Chinese Poetry Association, content director of Poetry Hall. She has been called the queen of love poetry and a rose in the poetic world, and her poetic style is called the Bing Hua Style. Her poems are so influential that they are considered “Bing Hua Phenomenon.” She began writing poetry during the 1980s. Her publications include February's Rose (2022), Selected Poems of Bing Hua, a bilingual work in Chinese and English published in 2019/2020, This is Love (2013), and Roses by the Stream, with a Chinese edition published in 2008 and a bilingual edition published in 2019. She co-edited Best Modern and Contemporary Chinese Poetry (2021), Best Overseas Chinese Poetry (2021), Penetrating Time and Space–A Poetry Group of William Marr（2022). Two of her poems, “A Hand Fan” and “Neither out of Flighty or Levity,” won the Belief in Love Golden Award in the 31st World Congress Poets Contest. The “Lotus Obsession,” won the Butterfly Golden Award in the 1st World Chinese Language Love Poems Contest. She was judged an excellent poet by the Poetry Network in 2016. Bing Hua won the China New Regression Poets award in 2017, and was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2015 and 2021.

Yingcai Xu is a teacher, poet, translator, the president of the Chinese Poetry Association and the Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Hall. He has taught classical and modern Chinese languages, classical and modern Chinese literature, Chinese cinema, Chinese calligraphy (theory and practice), and translation. Yingcai Xu once went to teach at McMaster University, Canada and took Canadian literature courses there. Later, he came to DePaul University, USA to study English and American literature. There Yingcai Xu established the university's Chinese program. He has about a dozen translation books published. Some of these books have become government gifts and some university teaching materials. In translation, he established a three-word principle for himself: accuracy, individuality, and cohesion. While trying to achieve an accurate rendering of the original text, he pursues the original spirit and a translation highly acceptable by mother-tongue readers. Besides, he has edited and co-edited a dozen translation books. Yingcai Xu is also a poet. His poetry publications include Poetic South, Inspiration from Nature, We Are Here Painting, 100 Three-line Poems by Yingcai Xu, Poems by Yingcai. He is now preparing to have a collection of haikus published. His poetic philosophy is: To use simple, appealing, and imagination-evoking language to create vivid and poetic-sense-infused poems that come directly from the heart and the physical world and create a lasting and glittering effect of artistic conception.



FROM THE BOOK:


The Sunflower
by Bing Hua
Translation by Yingcai Xu

Is a newborn baby's
Sweet smile in its dream
Or the youthful flower
In bud ready to bloom
–No
It's an ancient Greek nymph
Clytie
In love with the Sun

She loves him
So her heart turns toward him
From sunrise to sunset

She loves him
So she looks up to him
Till her hair turns grey

Close or far
It's measured by light
Faithful and true
It's witnessed by Heaven and the Earth

Van Gogh's Sunflower
Has a set value
But Clytie's
Is priceless

O
My Apollo
I love you
But conceited as I am
I can't utter
The word LOVE

All my love
Has gone hidden
In Van Gogh's painting

My love
Is Clytie's love
And Clytie's love
Is
The Sunflower

Quill & Parchment:February’s Rose Reviewed by Michael Escoubas

February’s Rose
by Bing Hua
Translation by Yingcai Xu
100 poems ~ 140 pages
Format: 6’’ x 9” ~ Perfect Bound
Price: $19.99
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
ISBN: ISBN-10: 1646627822
          ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-1646627820
To Order: Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Februarys-Rose-Bing-Hua/dp/1646627822/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1WLS9M16O2IBK&keywords=by+bing+hua&qid=1647629194&s=books&sprefix=%2Cstripbooks%2C43&sr=1-1

Reviewed by Michael Escoubas

The esteemed early 20th century novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947) once wrote:

“Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Art must spring out of the fulness and richness of life.”

Although Cather was a novelist and Bing Hua a poet, I sense an affinity between them. Both understand the purpose of art. Both instill the idea that life and art cannot be separated. Both know love. Both know disappointment. Both know loss and the joy of recovering stronger and better in the face of loss.

February’s Rose, superbly translated by Yingcai Xu, portrays life with a strong sense of where people live. Intuitively, the poet captures the ironies of love. She does this in smooth, economical lines. With no end-line punctuation, readers enjoy close access to the poet’s mind and heart. She comes across as genuine and accessible. Her poems resonate with tensions of self-understanding; fears of what to do next, and joys triumphant in the human spirit.

Organized into seven sections, February’s Rose, combines seasonal themes with cor-responding seasons of the heart. The sections include: I. The Sunflower, II. February’s Rose, III. That Summer, IV. The Lotus’ Obsession, V. Never Invest in Love, VI. A Hand Fan, and VII. The Scarf of the Moonlight. Even the section titles evoke interest.

Notice the confluence of city, nature and love in this excerpt from “The Sound of Silence”:

          On the busy modern street
          Who runs to the spring of heart

          Bathing in the morning rays of materials
          And keeping off from the moonlight of sexual desire
          Loneliness
          Is the biting wind of winter

          Long black hair
          That drifts in the wind
          Lacerates the air

          When the sound of silence
          Wafts over from the distance
          Nobody can hear it
          That is the gurgling of a rill
          And the throbbing of a mountain

You won’t want to miss how the poet uses the sound of silence to create a memorable moment of love.

Love is Bing Hua’s overriding theme. She includes virtually every month and season of the year showing connections between the outer world of nature and the inner (and often invisible) world of human nature.

Bing Hua’s talent for personification is displayed in “The Amorous Knot of June”:

          Closer and closer, the blue sky
          Walks on white clouds into my heart

          In June’s garden
          Every night, new plants sprout
          Every morning, new flowers bloom

          June’s ocean
          Is a dream to embrace the blue sky
          Is a wing to heave splashes

          A white sail glides to the distance
          Lightly and evenly stretching out
          The colors of the blue sky and the ocean

          On the wind-touched riverbank
          Two coconut palms stand hand in hand
          But cannot tie the amorous knot

Here, the poet is in love with nature. She invokes a kind of emotional completion, which is satisfying to her contemplative heart. Never one to provide an easy answer to life’s challenges, “Two coconut palms stand hand in hand / But cannot tie the amorous knot.”

The poem “Spring” brings Emily Dickinson to mind:

          I wonder what type of fan spring uses
          That has fanned the grass green and flowers red
          I wonder what type of comb spring uses
          That has spruced up the gardens and streets

          I only see
          A fresh and bright rose in the garden
          Blooming in the most eye-catching place
          A wedding float in the street
          Coming from where birds come

          O, spring, you are so sweet and charming
          I want to be the bride of spring too

Love, for this poet, extends beyond human love. Bing Hua feels encircled by love. Possessed by the world’s beauty, and like Dickinson, her work is punctuated with wonder.

As with her section titles, her poem titles attract interest: “Come on Over,” “Why,” “My Longing for You Is Like Snow,” “Fish Begin to Chuckle,” “Teeth,” “Dust,” and “The Scarf of Moonlight,” to name but a few.

Throughout February’s Rose, Bing Hua’s poetry exhibits craftsmanship, maturity and clarity of purpose.

All of this is superbly illustrated in “If I Were Wind”:

          If I were wind
          I would fly and fly
          Till I alight on his shoulders
          If I were wind
          I would blow and blow
          To blow my love into his heart

Yes, Willa Cather would be proud; because, like Cather, Bing Hua’s art springs from the fulness and richness of life.


http://quillandparchment.com/archives/August2022/book4.html

July 2022:

http://quillandparchment.com/archives/July2022/vol253.html



February’s Rose

http://quillandparchment.com/archives/July2022/new3.html

http://bing-hua.hxwk.org/2022/06/18/februarys-rose-new-book-release-nbr-article/