Sublime. Quiet. Evocative. / Trilliums and purity. / The world marvels before it destroys.
—Mary Magagna-McBride
The classical Chinese poets wrote with humility and a deep regard for the natural world. Their relationships with others were attuned to the nuances of wind and rain, the voices of flowers and animals, and the vast dimensions of landscape. Consequently they embraced the moment, treasured minute perceptions, and kept their memories close. Leonard Cirino’s imitations and responses to these poets don’t merely capture or recreate, but re-imagine through his own idiom and experiences the grace and bounty of that world-view.
—William Doreski,
author of The Modern Voice in American Poetry,
Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors,
and The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allan Tate.
Leonard J Cirino’s Chinese Masters is tranquility personified. He has a way of aligning the stars, the sky, and the world across the page. When I have read any of Leonard’s books, I feel as though I am stepping into a lesson on perfect language structure. His words are fluid, his vowels concise, his craft evident, he makes it look so easy, with such graceful strokes of his matured pen. His voice is brilliant, pure, and resoundingly to the point. I have always felt a transcendent moment on the pages he writes. Leonard’s works are a quiet contribution to poetry, yet they represent a talent so vast, he always makes me wince. I am stunned by his intellectual abilities, his intimate charm, his sadness and depth, his poetry moves not only the proverbial (Chinese) mountain, but the heart within all who reach out to listen.
—Jane Crown,
author of Her Delicate Shoe,
editor of the online magazine Heavy Bear,
and host of the online poetry talk program,
The Jane Crown Show.
Cirino keeps paring down his Chinese poems, adjusting them to his own unique perceptions, bringing them out of ancient China and giving them the colloquial sound they have now, in this world. I think he has gone deeper into the insight that makes Chinese poetry so different, so ethereal in such a well-grounded way.
—Philip Ramp,
author of Homing and several books in translation from modern Greek poets.
Comments about After Yang Chi and Others, also available from March Street Books:
Reading the set of poems after the Later Chinese, I find it remarkable how well you take on the tone of the originals, and how aptly your own Oregon setting and life doubles for those of the old philosopher poets in their countryside haunts.
—James Torrens, S.J.
poetry editor of America (NYC)
Leonard Cirino’s poems capture their tone and spirit of the classical Chinese poets far better than conventional translations do. Cirino’s own sensibility—his grasp of the natural symbol and his sense of humanity’s modest place in the cosmos—accords so well with that of Yang Chi, Yuan Hung-tao, and others, that he closes the gap between their centuries and ours.
—William Doreski
I started reading Chinese poetry during my young manhood. I liked it because it was other-directed and not inner-directed. I also liked the fact that it explored the spiritual through the natural. This collection of poetry, After Yang Chi and Others, is a real treat and a real pleasure. Wallace Stevens once wrote: “In the absence of a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” These poems redeemed me.
—Dave McCain