Before and since his enforced exile, Yang Lian has been one of the most
innovative and influential poets in China. Widely hailed in America and
Europe as a highly individual voice in world literature, he has been
translated into many languages. Yang Lian has written that Concentric
Circles is 'the most important piece since I came out from China', and
that it is emphatically not a political work, but instead a work focused
on 'deep reality' and the nature of how humans understand that reality
through the medium of language. The book, like the sections of which it
is comprised, uses a kind of collage, where many small fragments, each
complete in itself, are aligned together in a series of patterns to form
a grander mosaic: from line to line, poem to poem, cycle to cycle, in
ever-widening concentric structures. Yang Lian regards this English
version as an integral part of the work as a whole - indeed, it could be
said that the work is incomplete without its English parallel, and that
as he reads it he is 'struggling free from time and incorporated into
the beautiful "concentric circles" of ancient and modern poetry, in
China or elsewhere'.