Andreas Weiland, Jade Mountain Poems | Jade Berg Gedichte (1st Edition) (Buy this book)
Review by deb Ewing
I’m in love with every inch of this book, beginning with its backstory. I don’t have to tell you the backstory; you’ll understand it as you read the book. Andreas Weiland opens with his arrival as a German English lecturer coming to teach in 1970s Taiwan, and with the man who checked his passport.
In Taipei war es heiß
Der Mann am Flughafen
der den Pass kontrollierte
sah mich kurz an
und lächelte
Tamkang? fragte er
Und sagte dann
Good school
In Taipei, it was hot
The man at the airport
who was checking
my passport
briefly looked at me
and smiled
Tamkang? he asked
And then sd
Good school
All the images in this volume, even the cover, were provided by the author – photos he took back then, and scanned sometime later. The resolution was so low that we resorted to modern tricks to make them look even worse. The result is charming and nostalgic as the poetry they mirror.
Weiland paints a picture of another time, in another world, where the ancient and modern walk together, riding the city bus with mothers and their children. Industry and media are the setting for our collective conscience, even as we join the narrator in a Chinese restaurant while he delays a child’s bedtime by being the last customer.
Weiland eventually went back to Germany, taking his heart and his poetry with him. He decided to translate his words into German, and eventually decided to share them with his friend Jack Foley, who decided Andreas must share this collection with us. We are forever grateful for this project decades in the making.
Throughout the making of this book, I communicated with the poet several times: to make sure I was reading the German translation correctly; to ask about locations in the images or clear the graphic work with him. Everything he writes is poetry, down to describing the small town in Northern Germany where he lives now.
While editing this volume, I found myself inspired to write a poem that expressed how the poems made me feel. My friend Bill Goodell was inspired to set it to music. Andreas liked it very much.
You can hear “Sugar in the Wound” on Facebook here.