A Faithful Record of the Lisbon Maru Incident, translated by Major (Ret’d) Brian Finch, MCIL, Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Series, Proverse Hong Kong 2017. 224pp. Pbk, Kindle Ebook. Available from chineseupress.com, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk.

A Faithful Record of the Lisbon Maru Incident lives up to its name by providing a touching account of a real event that occurred in World War II. At 9:37am, the USS Grouper fired upon and sank the Lisbon Maru, an armed Japanese freighter transporting over 1800 allied prisoners of war from China to Japan. Before they left, the departing Japanese sailors battened down the hatches over the holds, trapping the prisoners of war inside. Eventually, some 384 allied POWs were rescued from the unforgiving sea by Chinese fishermen who risked their lives to save them.

This book contains a number of direct translations from different Chinese sources including newspapers and personal accounts from fishermen. There are also extensive appendices containing information on the soldiers, their regiments, the Lisbon Maru and the USS Grouper. Some of the personal accounts are touching, and they show us how being good human beings transcends stereotypes of nationality and race. This material would be of great value to anyone who is conducting research into the sinking of the Lisbon Maru or has a personal interest in the subject.

-- Carsten John

Laura Solomon's second poetry collection, "Frida Kahlo's Cry", has now been published and is available on Amazon Kindle and in paperback through amazon.com.

In his advance comments, Andrew S. Guthrie, author of the poetry collection, Alphabet (Finalist, Proverse 2015), writes:

'One of the purposes of poetry is to make inner thought visible; the things which were previously invisible (or unknown) that can only be revealed through poetic speculation. Laura Solomon’s work makes no claim that poetry is “truth”, while yet accessing its potential to grasp the slippery nature of “reality”.  ...  Laura Solomon takes on the poetic task of attempting to expose the outlook of the non-human, or the thoughts of the historically remote personality;...speaking for these creatures and people in the melancholic demeanor of the yet-to-be-understood, or alternately, expressing the plaintive lament of all of us who languish within the confines of a missed opportunity. Solomon gives all of that a voice, while acknowledging the limits of language and the human psyche. As she states, (in ‘Resurfacing From the Wreck’) “If I still had a tongue in my head/I could tell you what I saw down there”.'

 REVIEWED RECENTLY

 Dr Jason S Polley's refrain

has received an empathetic and excellent review, 'Capturing India',

by Ankur Agarwal,

published in Asian Cha.

To read the whole review, please see

Reviews / June 2015 (Issue 28) at:

www.asiancha.com

Andrew S. Guthrie's poetry-collection, Alphabet,

a Proverse Prize finalist,

has been reviewed by Ching Yuet May.

"This volume of poetry revels in antics of the mind that also spin off to wanderings in the maze of a city, thus opening up the self-reflexivity of the poems to the sights and sounds of an urban centre. In the poem, 'grammar school,' downtown Boston serves as the backdrop of a mad run of strange markings. New York is the setting for another poem, 'lost fonts,' where a novice poet locks himself up in a hotel room to write up his masterpiece while city  noises and voices keep on wafting into the hotel room and into the poetry. The volume merits recognition from still another city, Hong Kong, for the readers there, as readers elsewhere, may like to enjoy deciphering the strange markings that have strayed across borders."

-- From the Review by Ching Yuet May

~~~

Jan Pearson's Tiger Autumn, a Proverse Prize Publication, was favourably reviewed by William Wadsworth in theSunday Morning Post, Hong Kong, 24 May 2015.

"Tiger Autumn is ... one of the best Hong Kong novels in years, because its author writes simply; gets on with a well-crafted plot; and builds credible dialogue and characters.

"Pearson has remembered that fiction is entertainment as much as art, and she is certainly a name to watch."