This book is a follow-up to the author's previous Peter Lang book The Rendez-Vous: Poems of
Multicultural Experience (2003). The new book contains recent poetry and prose by Andrew Parkin
together with the prefaces to two new longer poems. The Gourds is based on a collection of
small Chinese gourds etched to depict scenes from literature and legend. Star of a Hundred
Years is a dramatic ode dedicated to the father of Hong Kong cinema Sir Run Run Shaw who is
more than one hundred years old and whose lifetime coincides with the history of film. The ode
is thus cast in the form of a film scenario this creates a scenariode a new sub-genre of
verse. There are also lyrics and prose poems as well as fiction all involving cross-cultural
experience found in a variety of places in different countries. A sequence of «flashes» reveals
the past as not only another country but also another culture contrasting with our
contemporary lives in certain ways. The mixture of genres and the way they contrast with one
another reflect at times the post-modern moment in literature. And again in the continuum and
fragmented flashes of memory it becomes evident that many of us now live as international and
trans-cultural people.
