Embracing the Sword

Embracing the Sword is the debut poetry collection of veteran journalist Bao Jian (pen name Mr. Embracing the Sword), published by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House in October 2020 and produced by Guomai Culture. The book is divided into three sections—"The Seasons Relay, I Will Walk Against the Wind," "Our Kin Wait for Spring in Winter," and "Except for Time, Which Is Conserved, Everything Is Accelerating"—and collects more than one hundred poems, including "Beginning of Spring," "Constellations," "You and the Moon," "Hometown," "The Me in All Things," "Back in the Saddle," and "Exile—for Mandelstam." The scenes in the poems are mostly drawn from the pre-dawn sky, journeys in flight, the turning of the seasons, and the city at night; they include whispers to family, hometown, and daughter, as well as a calm scrutiny of an accelerating age and restless hearts. The language is terse and restrained, skilled at hiding great emotion in small scenes: a lamp, a red scarf, a ruin are all written as evidence of life persevering through time. The author declares, "I will walk against the wind," and the whole collection reads like a soliloquy of one walking alone with a sword, gentleness and wildness side by side, reticence and roughness alternating, touching the sensitive, warm places in the heart before one realizes it.