The sixty poems in Bickley's first collection were written during almost thirty years' residence in Hong Kong. Most are on explicitly Hong Kong, urban, and green topics, and reflect the writer's knowledge and personal experience as an expatriate.   Poems about Chinese traditions mix with poems on anti-consumerism and cultural variety.   She finds significance in everyday social encounters and reflects on a variety of cultural events: for example, a performance by the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Lorin Maazel, at the Tenth Hong Kong Arts Festival; Chinese Operas performed as part of a Festival of Chinese Opera, which was held some months after the return of the former British Crown Colony to the Government of Mainland China; and the Equestrian opera of Saumur, held as part of The French May.   More personal poems portray family relationships, conveying the tensions caused by deep feeling, indirectly expressed, and the concerned sadness of final parting.   The book concludes with, Literary Odyssey in Hong Kong: A Personal Narrative, the text of a talk given to the English Society of the University of Hong Kong, on 19 April 2002, during the English Festival.   This talk reflects on the important question which some Chinese Hong Kong writers face, whether to choose to produce their literary work in Chinese or English.   The essay also describes incidents in Hong Kong's English Language literary scene, beginning in 1970.   The two CDs included with the book are a professional recording of all sixty poems, read by the author herself. 

For the Record and Other Poems of Hong Kong

Literature & Fiction

Gillian Bickley

Poetry

Proverse Hong Kong

A Misted Mirror (Winners of the International Proverse Prize)

Jones, Gillian

Jones, Keith

Biographies & Memoirs

Death Has A Thousand Doors

Patricia W. Grey

A SHIMMERING SEA: HONG KONG STORIES tells of a quest for home, told through a vivid and lyrical sequence of narratives. Sophronia Liu chronicles first her beginnings in 1950s' Hong Kong. Her parents each an indigenous inhabitant of a clan village had very different life-experiences from each other. Her father attended prestigious King s College as a scholarship student; her mother, an illiterate peasant, was fully occupied in raising ten children. Among the episodes, some tell of her growing up during the 1960s: of a grade school classmate s tragic suicide, the arrival of a rambunctious and feisty domestic helper from the countryside, plainclothes detectives who came to her home to solicit her father for a bribe. She tells of her mother s long illness, of turmoil and quarrels among family members. Some twenty years later, when Liu was a student in the American Midwest, memories of these people and places flooded back to haunt her. Responding to their call, Sophronia eventually returned to Hong Kong in 2006, to live near her native village and continue to write. She passed away on 14 January 2013, one day after her 60th birthday.

A Shimmering Sea: Hong Kong Stories

Sophronia Liu

UNLOCKING is Mary-Jane Newton's second book of verse. In this vibrant new collection, Newton evokes a life experienced in cycles, characterized by peaks and troughs, fecundity and sterility, growth and retrenchment, optimism and despair. And punctuating these cycles, an infinite array of new beginnings, or openings, or un-lockings. The poems in this collection insist that unlocking concerns more than simply change and transition. It involves too the stretching of the mind and body, the catharsis of deep emotion, and the rethinking of ideas and habits.

Unlocking

Mary-Jane Newton

Red Bird Summer (Hong Kong China mystery espionage and crime novels)

Pearson, Jan

Literary

Alphabet consists of twenty-six poems concerning the vagaries of failure, the underrated opposite of success. But in this case, the context of failure necessarily includes the genre of contemporary poetry, that most disabused yet over-abundant mode of expression. Why would anyone choose to express themselves in a manner that automatically narrows the readership, even after dispensing with avant-garde ambitions? – Precisely because its condition might lend itself to the aimless, useless or extra-economic moments when success can be turned on its head. And though the poet might be prone to the audience’s neglect, history itself is rife with countless examples of spectacular literary failures (as addressed in Alphabet), whether these traumas are eventually redeemed or forever lost. These examples include: misplaced manuscripts, writer’s block, articulate illiterates, libraries that were burned to the ground, posthumous fame for the previously poverty-stricken, botched yet endlessly repeated translations, along with the obvious shortcomings of the dilettante, the over-inflated ego, and the perennial loser.

Alphabet (Proverse Prize Publications)

Guthrie, Andrew S.

CHASING LIGHT is Patricia Glinton-Meicholas' third book of poetry and a finalist for the International Proverse Prize 2012. A challenging and controversial complexity of opinion pervades the collection, accurately signaled by the double-entendre of the title. Taken as a whole, the poems express concern for humankind worldwide, with a particular emphasis on the life of women, particularly those with an African or Caribbean heritage. Glinton-Meicholas speaks equally for those she imagines to live colourless, passionless lives and those whose private relations are ample and fulfilling. She responds to regional and international events, particularly the troubles brought by local politics and attitudes, and by war. The poems show a person passionately aware and caring, conscious of deity in various manifestations and hoping for the world's salvation from this source. Nevertheless she acknowledges that man has free-will and that it is for man to exercise his free-will to solve or avoid problems. The writing -- with occasional lines in creole¾is sophisticated and rewards close attention from the reader.

Chasing Light (Proverse Prize Publications)

Glinton-Gleicholas, Patricia

The subject of this biography, Sir George Macartney, was of mixed Scottish-Chinese parentage. Based in remote Kashgar on the famous Silk Road, he was caught up in the great 19th and early 20th century power-struggle between Britain, China and Russia over control of Central Asia in what came to be known as 'The Great Game'. Here he met the scheming Russian Consul Nicolai Petrovsky who was to prove a cunning adversary in the political contest for control in this turbulent region. Much of the book is concerned with Petrovsky's devious machinations to outflank the British agent. Macartney's wife, Catherine, has provided intimate descriptions of their domestic life and some of the hazardous journeys they made with their family when travelling to and from the United Kingdom on leave. Her very few visitors were unstinting in their praise for her courage and adaptability, not least when seriously threatened by revolutionaries. They also recognised that only George Macartney, with his renowned tact and diplomacy, allied to steely determination, could have maintained the British position with so little external support. His dangerous encounter leading a mission to the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Tashkent made for a dramatic finale to his extraordinary career in a restive region now causing concern to the Chinese government.

The Diplomat of Kashgar: A Very Special Agent: The Life of Sir George Macartney, 18 January 1867 - 19 May 1945 (Winners of the International Proverse Prize)

McCarthy, James

Historical

Set in Beijing and Hong Kong, ARTICLE 109 is a high-octane, page-turning thriller. A young solicitor, investigating the suicide of his former colleague, unravels a conspiracy to cause chaos on the financial markets by instigating the downfall of one of Asia's richest tycoons. ARTICLE 109, Joint-Winner of the Proverse Prize 2011, lifts the lid on Hong Kong's fragile status as an international financial centre and the role it plays in China's unrelenting march towards becoming the most powerful global economic superpower.A Hong Kong Bestseller.

Article 109 (Hong Kong China mystery espionage and crime novels)

Gregoire, Peter

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