Hai-Sui Yu 余海岁
Hai-Sui Yu, who writes under the pen-name Nan Xiangzi, was born in Huizhou, Anhui Province, China. He is a world-famous expert in geomechanics as well as a poet. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is a former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham and is now Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for the University of Leeds. He also served as an interim Vice-Chancellor and President at the University of Leeds from 2023 to 2024. He has been included in the prestigious annual Who's Who (A&C Black) since 2011. His poetry collections include Remembrance of the Heart, Dreams Returning from the Horizon, Ode to the Beginning of Winter, and Lamp in the Wind and Rain. He was named ‘Outstanding Poet of the Year’ in the 4th annual China New Poetry Awards, and received the Silver Willow Award at the 9th annual Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry and Arts Festival.
On his practice of writing poetry, Yu writes:
Confucius said, ‘Without studying poetry, one cannot speak.’ It’s been my good fortune to have had a long relationship with poetry.
As a child I was more drawn to prose. I admired the beautiful language in the essays we read in middle school, like Zhu Ziqing’s ‘Moonlight on the Lotus Pond’, Lu Xun’s ‘The Kite’, and Zhou Zuoren’s ‘Bitter Rain’. Then, in the early eighties when I went to university, I became interested in modern poetry. I loved poems like Dai Wangshu’s ‘Rain Alley’, Xu Zhimo’s ‘Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again’, Yu Guangzhong’s ‘Homesickness’, and Luo Fu’s ‘Beyond the Haze’, and I began writing poems in a similar style. Later, when I was at Oxford, I explored classical Chinese poetry and developed a deeper appreciation for the Tang and Song dynasty poets: Du Fu, Li Bai, Wang Wei, Meng Haoran, Wei Yingwu, Su Dongpo, Li Shangyin, Zhou Bangyan, Jiang Baishi.
Over the past two decades I’ve read more widely in modern poetry, both Chinese and Western. Among the latter, I particularly admire Ungaretti, Celan, Eliot, Rilke, Stevens, Bly, James Wright, Merwin, Borges, Baudelaire, Vallejo, Hardy, Tranströmer, Bracho, and Strand.
In terms of what I’m pursuing in my own artistic practice, I think of Qing dynasty poet Chen Tingzhuo’s ideal: ‘For practitioners of the lyric, the highest virtues are depth and resonance: not to be superficial, not to be thin. The idea precedes the brush, the spirit lingers beyond the words. A person mourns a lost home or a dream unfulfilled; a tree or a single blade of grass can express all the chill of the human world’s frustrations and disappointments. To express feeling in this way is to reveal only part of the whole, to communicate in subtle, resonant hints rather than state the emotion outright. To achieve this requires not only high artistry but also depth of character.’
I also think of what American poet Donald Hall said about the work of 'deep image' poet James Wright: Simple images carry the greatest tension.