Dallas, Texas Feb 10, 2020 (Issuewire.com) - Mundus Artium Press announces the 2020 release of Lost Alleys, poetry by acclaimed Korean writer, scholar and translator Kooseul Kim. The book, containing work honored with South Korea's Hong Jae Literary Award, offers an exquisitely intellectual, authoritative take on cross-cultural literature as an essential for human identity.
Lost Alleys will impress English-language readers as a splendid, stimulating distillation of insights on writing and philosophy from both the East and West, with striking implications for the individual worldview.
Kooseul Kim's poems lead readers into a locally-minded dialog with the culture of Korea, while also providing an unexpected means of timely reacquaintance with the Western heritage. Concurrently, while maintaining a measured tone of impersonal restraint, Lost Alleys incorporates charm, wry humor and daring vulnerability in positing strategies for inner and outer change.
In this collection, the Seoul-based poet's own renderings of her idiosyncratic work gain in artistry through her deft handling of the language and motifs of authors central to her thought and distinguished career. The poems in Lost Alleys demonstrate Kooseul Kim's passionate knowledge of anachronistic world writers, with whom their own cultures of origin still grapple.
An encounter with Lost Alleys invigoratingly recalibrates our notions of world literature. Enthrallingly reaching across time and space to learn from any canon, Kooseul Kim will bolster readers' resolve to do the same.
A specialist in English and other literary traditions, Kooseul Kim has served as a longtime professor and dean at Seoul's Hyupsung University. Vice president of the Society of East-West Comparative Literature and president emeritus of the T.S. Eliot Society of Korea, she has written extensively on the Anglo-American poet, in addition to many other publications on Western and Eastern literature and authors, past and present.
Lost Alleys welcomes readers into an unfolding conversation with Korea's and the world's humanist and religious heritage. Like T.S. Eliot, the Korean poet's adopted touchstone, Kooseul Kim celebrates and scrutinizes civilization, while also exploring facets of memory and consciousness. Like Eliot, she operates from within her native language and culture, while anchoring herself in a broader synthesis.
Kooseul Kim's poetry draws an independent map of cultural affinities, favoring the dimension of imagination and aesthetics while remaining breathtakingly grounded in empirical observations. The view from her richly complex dimension reveals a potently serene, archetypal mindfulness, achieved amid a flow of joy and suffering.
In Lost Alleys, scenes of South Korea's living literary culture provide moving testimony to the potential for the arts to transform the perspectives of people from all walks of life. Lost Alleys makes abundantly clear that the poet practices a commitment to literature as a public good. However, literature in society, for her, remains persistently focused on the priorities of erudition and the sanctity of inner life.
Encouraging fresh encounters with writers of contrasting places and eras, Kooseul Kim presciently suggests a need for contemporary society to assess its own merits with candor. To this end, she strikingly engages with perennially relevant authors such as Dante and George Orwell, as well as Korean classics like Yu Chiwhan and Buddhist poet-monk Kim Daljin. In manifesting literature's universal qualities, she contributes to forging a new universality.
The "alleys" in Kooseul Kim's new book originate in her experience, since childhood, of the South Korean capital's labyrinths of old backstreets. Navigating these winding alleys, she implies, provided early training for her future calling in the mazes of language and literature. Lost Alleys embraces the discipline of working through the puzzles of learning, whether formally or in life lessons. Serving enlightenment, these poems suggest, leads to subtly meaningful treasures.
In a millennium often in a rush for quick answers, Kooseul Kim provides unconventional guidance for the self and society. Her craft serves as a reminder of the redemptive power of a carefully cultivated heart and mind. This Korean writer draws discerningly on authentically global wisdom, suggesting new possibilities for tending to the world of the everyday.
The ISBN number for the paperback edition of the book is 978-0-939378-07-4.
Media Contact
Mundus Artium Press *****@aol.com http://www.mundusartiumpress.org
