Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2025
Breaking into Blossom by Anna Yin.
Book review by Terry McDonagh.
Breaking into Blossom (Frontenac House 2025) available at
https://www.frontenachouse.com/product/breaking-into-blossom/
To say this wonderful poetry collection is a treat or delight would be an understatement but it’s, somehow, true at the same time. Like a great love story, it deepens and challenges with every reading. It’s a slow-moving river that sparkles when it meets stones in shallow water. Each poem is a life story and contemplation in itself. It’s time out from hurray and hurdy-gurdy. We are invited to rest into a great field of blossoms and shapes where we can feel happy, sad and informed – maybe a little displaced and disturbed but we, certainly, come away richer in spirit and more enlightened. We really don’t want to leave these chunks of human endeavour.
The opening poem, Short Song, sets the blossom soundtrack in motion:
Last night’s rain
on peony petals –
a taste of pink
lingers on my tongue.
We are in the poems as the poet takes us on a multitude of colourful journeys – she speaks of conflict of culture, beliefs, love and interest. Each poem is a Breaking into Blossom – a birth that’s just happened or is about to take place. Anna ponders on the name given to her. ‘Anna, an angel with shadows’. Father, daughter, child – seasons replacing each other – one gradually going and the other coming. A progression that gathers pace and loses it with passing time. A kind of buzz permeates the entire collection. All of life is out on a spree. I don’t want to stop reading.
In Interviewing Yan Li, we are presented with the fragile poet’s mind inhabiting a house bursting with images of colour, rhythm and pictures of troubled outside world while the artist – a Monkey King – remains secure and detached in his revere. Here we sense the poet as observer, poised and finely-tuned with ever-ready, finely-tuned pen where the reader experiences a silent figure contemplating beauty, goodness, loss, exile and joy.
I feel caught up in a huge chunk of one person’s life that gently reaches out to all those willing and able to participate in her journey.
“Yan Li’s house bursting with paintings –
Modern, abstract, surreal –
blending image, rhythm and color.”
But
gold can buy anything but love.”
“What can break into blossom/”
In my dreams
we are feathers, fires, fossils
locked in the blue cell –
holding up the blue air
against gravity.
Anna Yin’s journey through a life in poetry continues on and on, deeper and deeper into intense, personal experiences and silent observation.
In Umpires’ Game, she quotes Emily Dickinson: saying nothing…sometimes says the most. I love this poem. There’s seems to be a kind of underlying anger bubbling – yet quiet, honest and savage…a kind of, you’re not fooling me…I know your game. Her politics is not party politics – it’s the politics of a genuine search for what it means to be truly human.
“I know their game.”
I have been buried long
before I was born.”
I say it again: reading these poems again and again transports me into a world I don’t ever want to leave. There is family, tension, words in shapes all trying to make sense of the magnificent and spectacular – almost surreal world – the poet inhabits. She is completely at home and completely not at home in two very different cultures. The term ‘exile’ as word and sensation clings to me as I read – there’s alienation too but it is rich alienation.
Exile
“I confess, I too have
sinned for my hunger for knowledge.
I do not belong here,
the forged garden, the fraudulent tree.”
The wonderful thing about this poet, is that she doesn’t seem to belong to any particular cultural, social or economic system. She is always in-the-making – a perpetual spring blossom about to burst. This is her reality and the reader is kept in waiting – in semi-darkness – drawn deeper and deeper into regions where acceptance and belief take over from so-called reality.
“I stood before a camera, my reflection merging
with centuries of Chinese history.”
And all the while, we are aware of the fragile longing imbedded in conscious and unconscious mind. We float in real and surreal mode but please “FORGET-ME-NOT” is never far from our thinking.
I realise, I have only touched on aspects of this wonderful collection. It is said the reader that always finishes the book. So be it. Reader, please take over. You will be enriched.
“The sunlight shifts in distinct shades,
you see letters,
each one memorable,
echoing a song
from your dearest lovers.”
In so many ways, this collection is a reflection on the universality of human experience. It is a search for TRUTH:
In my dreams
always two frogs.
I spend the whole night
wondering which is the true prince
The dawn simply takes
both
away.
© Terry McDonagh
Anna Yin was Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate (2015-17) and has authored seven poetry collections including the recent “Breaking into Blossom” (Frontenac House 2025) and four books of translations. Anna won the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, two MARTYs, two scholarships from USA and grants from Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. Her poems/translations have appeared at Queen’s Quarterly, ARC Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, Literary Review of Canada etc. She read on Parliament Hill, at Austin International Poetry Festival, Edmonton Poetry Festival and universities in China, Canada and USA etc. She teaches Poetry Alive.
Breaking into Blossom (Frontenac House 2025) available at
https://www.frontenachouse.com/product/breaking-into-blossom/
Terry McDonagh, poet and dramatist, has worked in Europe, Asia and Australia. He’s taught creative writing at Hamburg University and was Drama Director at Hamburg International School. Published fifteen poetry collections, as well as letters, drama, prose and poetry for young people. In March 2022, he was poet in residence and Grand Marshal as part of the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in Brussels. His work has been translated into German, Indonesian and Arabic. His poem, ‘UCG by Degrees’ is included in the Galway Poetry Trail on Galway University campus. In 2020, Two Notes for Home – a two-part radio documentary, compiled and presented by Werner Lewon, on The Life and Work of Terry McDonagh, The Modern Bard of Cill Aodáin. His latest poetry collections: an eBook ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Not Dead’ – Live Encounters Publishing; and ‘I Write Because’ (for young people) – Calendar Road Press. After more than thirty years in Hamburg, he returned to live in County Mayo in 2019.