Ode to Mother: Litany of Fire — POEM 𝒃𝒚 Ma Yongbo
Author
My mother is a cold flame;
My mother is a flame from the bottom of the sea;
My mother is a flame of pure white lily of the valley,
A broken miner light my mother is,
Ma Yongbo was born in 1964. He is a Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. He has recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1178 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry. He is the editor-in-chief of the “Chinese Regional Poetry Yearbook” and the “Northeast Three Provinces Poetry Yearbook”.