Introduction to Homings and Departures: Selected Poems from Contemporary China and Australia

This bilingual Homings and Departures anthology featuring Australian poets is part of a larger project that sees Australian poets translated into Chinese, and Chinese poets translated into English. The companion volume of Chinese poetry, edited by Fudan University colleagues Bao Huiyi and Hai An, has already been published in China by Qinghai People’s Publishing House, and a selection from that volume has been featured in the Australian journal, Cordite Poetry Review as an online chapbook (at http://cordite.org.au/chapbooks-features/homingsdepartures/). Ie anthology was conceived in a spirit of enthusiastic cooperation in discussions between representatives of the China Australia Writing Centre (CAWC—http://cawc.curtin.edu.au) at Curtin University in Western Australia, International Poetry Studies (IPSI—https://www. canberra.edu.au/research/faculty-research-centres/cccr/research/ipsi) at the University of Canberra, and Fudan University in Shanghai. Almost everyone involved in those preliminary discussions was a poet, a translator or a lover of poetry and believed that the idea of sharing poetry across two cultures through translation was too good to resist.