Elbert Siu Ping Lee

Rain on the Pacific Coast Elbert Siu Ping Lee

RAIN ON THE PACIFIC COAST is a tapestry of human experience, in which desires and passing worlds crisscross, collude, and collide. Each poem is a tiny spark that flies off in various types of encounter, giving significance and illumination to seemingly brief and mundane moments of daily existence. The poems are rooted in space and time and involve real people. Read in a certain way, they are mini life-dramas. Behind the scenes, the poet plays the roles of provocateur, critic, voyeur, seducer, lamenter, lover, and spiritual guide. Many of the poems were written in different places in Hong Kong around the time of change over. Others were conceived at various locations from Eastern Canada to the Pearl River Delta."The community Lee writes to is very diverse - from the very local to the very universal .... Rain on the Pacific Coast is a rich culmination of his work over the years. ... The collection as a whole takes us from one place to another, from Hong Kong to other places on the Pacific Coast and back again." - Agnes S. L. Lam"In a city both burdened and enlightened by its past, life may be difficult, the air oppressive, and people awaiting a storm that brings an unpredictable outcome. But there can be an order in the ordinary, opening up paths to new vistas. Many poems in the volume appeal to a resilience in the natural world, in the human heart, in the common ways of people just walking around, observing, criticizing, sympathizing, so that we can seek solace in a wandering crowd, derive joy from poetry that sings of people and their habitus, and trust in forces that will bring sometimes sunshine, sometimes rain to the Pacific Coast." - Ching Yuet May