Translucency

Translucency puts together about fifty poems by Chankyung Sung that showcase his dexterous command of metaphor and subtle sensibility toward language. In these poems, Sung portrays a complex world of man's spirit with refined language, opening a new horizon of intellectual poetry, or "metaphysical lyrics," in Korea. It is not the principle of constructing experience, but the posi-tive intellectual process of perceiving new experiences that governs Sung's poetic world. Sung extracts the best of the East and West and combines them in his poetry. The mystery of life is the leitmotif of his poetry; he grasps the structure of soul with intuition and portrays it in a metaphor refined in his fur-nace-like imagination which melts down heterogeneous things. About the Poet: Chankyung Sung was born in Yesan in 1930 and studied Eng-lish literature at college. He began to publish his poems in 1950s and has written eight books of poetry including Fugue for a Burning at the Stake (1966), Translucency (1984), Silent Drama (1995), and Distance Makes Universe a Toy (2006). Sung has re-ceived Korean Association of Poets Award, Weoltan Literary Award, and Seoul City Literary Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Arts.