Awaking Demons: The Notebooks of Tien Mai

Tien Mai, the poet-narrator of Daniel Samoilovich's book-length sequence, Awaking Demons, is a self-exiled Vietnamese princeling grumpily eking out a hotel life in 1930s Switzerland. 'Here/ where even the butterflies are different' is a source of amusement and amazement to him as he details the behaviour of the hotel servants and the other guests, and the strange local customs. But more often his mind turns to the woman he has left behind: 'The distance between us is greater/than the empire of night', and to the consolations of Eastern art, especially the poets of the Tang dynasty, Wang Wei, Du Mu and Li Po. Like them, he stands at his lectern with his brushes, composing in meticulous calligraphy, in perfect ideograms, poems of nature, philosophy, memory and love, though against the backdrop of the Swiss lakes rather than the Yangtze river. Tien Mai is a rounded and subtle creation - querulous, humorous, cynical, profound, whimsical, romantic - and rather a wonderful lyric poet.