My Village
Selected Poems, 1966-2014
Wu Sheng has written vivid poems about rural life and the land since the 1960s, when he became one of Taiwan's most popular poets. His poems are rooted in the soil, embued with an unshakable affinity for the people who till it, sweat over it, and eventually are buried in it, and serve as his personal response to the industrialization, urbanization and globalization of his vanishing world.
Wu Sheng, born in 1944, is a farmer, teacher, poet, essayist and environmental activist who lives in central Taiwan. He has written more than a dozen volumes of poems and essays, and in 2007, received the Wu Sanlian Literature Award, one of Taiwan’s most prestigious honors. In 2002, he and his wife spent a year exploring and reporting on the social and environmental conditions of Taiwan’s longest river, the Zhuoshui River. He also purchased land near his farm and created a park forested with trees native to Taiwan. Wu Sheng’s work was the first to be digitized for the National Museum of Taiwan Literature’s digital archives, and many of his poems have been set to music in two published sets of cds.
