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Wan-Hu's Flying Chair

Several of the poems in Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair (Salt, 2009) explore points of contact between Western and Chinese myths (cultural, political, aesthetic). The volume as a whole examines a poetics of “interfriction”, setting up a dialogue with an idea explored at various points and by different contributors in Marggraf Turley’s edited collection of critical essays, Creative Interfrictions: The Writer in the Academy (D. S. Brewer, 2012). This conceptualised approach to the volume offers a means of investigating and of becoming inward with, various issues such as complicity, quiescence, responsibility and desire. Tensions between these themes are given fraught articulation by the collection’s narrators, many of whom exist as “thrown” voices in dramatic monologue mode. Another key strand in the collection explores the resonance of place, and specifically, the ways in which the Forest of Dean, Wales and the landscapes of Chinese myth provide composite settings, that can in turn become political spaces. The creative work examines and scrutinizes new historicist frequencies, such as those materialist inflections of Marggraf Turley’s critical studies of Romantic coterie, found especially in Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (LUP, 2009).