Publisher's Synopsis
"Kim Ryo's Thinking Window Verses is a remarkable work of memory and imagination, a diaristic compendium of the people and places the poet encountered at the turn of the 19th century in Puryong, a town near the northern border, where he served the first of two five-year terms of exile. It was during his second term, in the southeastern port of Chinhae that he wrote three hundred poems. The poems are composed of Chinese characters and each poem has twelve phrases and begins with the question: "I ask, what do you think / of our beloved northern seaside?" The various answers he provides reveal a surprisingly modern sensibility, a clear-eyed vision of a world he came to love, notwithstanding his loneliness and despair. For Kim Ryo was an uncommonly empathetic figure, who took the measure of the people he met and transformed his experiences with them into poetry for the ages"--.
