Black Stars

“Reading Ngo Tu Lap’s poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me—nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I’ve loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. The French called PTSD nostalgie. I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems.”

“Underlying tensions animate these arresting poems by Ngo Tu Lap, movingly translated by Martha Collins and the author. Coinhabiting past and present, the speaker conflates absence and presence so that ‘On the finger of a woman who died young / A ring still sparkles / In the depths of the black earth.’ Inside this dual perspective, we, as readers, are enriched.”

“A light flickers in and among the shadows and darkness we find in Ngo Tu Lap’s poetry. This light is ineffable, and yet utterly present. As Lap writes, it is like ‘the whispered call of a star at the edge of the sky.’ In these vivid and moving translations, Lap’s poems come to us with the light of his own whispered calls from afar.”

“Through this book, Ngo Tu Lap takes flight from his youth with a narrative flow that bears the imprint of our greatest ancient poets. We can only rejoice that Lap’s lifelong horrors are transformed into dream-like images, becoming elegant amendments to a disgraceful time in history. All that is ugly is redeemed by his descriptive writing, poetic restraint, and ennobling experience.”