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ABSTRACT: This paper considers the site of Hong Kong as a growing one for works of the imagination. This globalized financial centre with its many contradictions and anomalies may yet be tamed by writing; and, in process of which, may arrive at a more definite sense of identity. As a sample of Hong Kong poetry in English, works of some local poets are introduced here, and these poems are included in the final section. Four poems by Louise Ho are included in the appendix to the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the literary career of poet Robert Lowell and his works. Near the middle of Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, a new trope appears, one that will continue in several successive books, particularly those whose poems are often presented as daily notes--Notebook 1967-68, Notebook, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. Following the poems of optical, epidermal, and neural sensitivity--Night Sweat, The Lesson, The Neo-Classical Urn, and Eye and Tooth--come poems of travel in which journeys appear as new contexts for that sensitization: Going To and Fro, Returning, Buenos Aires, and Dropping South: Brazil, present the strained, introspective speaker of Lowell's breakthrough phase, introduced in Life Studies, as increasingly vulnerable to and destabilized by the duress of travel. The rhetoric becomes murkier, the speaker more disoriented, as he moves from his center of gravity in New England. In Lowell, the disorientation of travel became a metaphor for, if not often a cause of, the disorientation of psychological illness. From this phase until the end of Lowell's life, travel was a texture used to generate fractured narratives of the troubled traveler's ego.

The article offers criticism of the poems by Robert Brooke. Brooke's description of the sensations of viewing the Rockies in one of his travel papers is provided. His poems reflect his view of life as a fleeting, restless, dizzying, rapturous and evanishing experience. The article notes that Brooke's poetry is concerned with the fruits of existence and not its flowers.