In 1985, Gary Geddes won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region, for
The Terracotta Army
, a brilliant sequence of his Chinese sonnets. The nine-couplet poems were inspired by his 1981 visit to the archaeological site in China where more than 8,000 individually sculpted, life-sized soldiers and horses were interred in the third century to accompany Emperor Ch'in Shi Huang Di into the afterlife.
In this ideologically charged volume, Geddes gives voice to a few soldiers, who engage in myriad debates about the abuse of power, the yin-yang dance of narrative and silence, and the sanctity of the idiosyncratic self in the face of conformity.
This new edition of
, published to coincide with the Canadian tour of
The Warrior Emperor and China's Terracotta Army
, opening at the ROM in late June 2010, pairs Geddes' poems with photographs of the terracotta soldiers.