The return of the native

Brian Power’s book, like the best Chinese paintings, contains a lot of empty space. You can either concentrate on what you see, or you can let your mind and imagination glide over into what might have been there. I have a silk-screen of a painting by the Song dynasty master Liang Kai (13th century) on my wall; Li Bai, the great Tang dynasty poet (8th century), probably drunk and standing on tip-toe, is gazing up at the moon. There is no moon in the picture, only the empty, not blank, space. I know the moon is there because in one of his poems Li Bai describes looking up at it.

Power’s book is like that. Misty figures appear and disappear; are they real, in a dream, or one of his ‘reveries’? This slim book, first published in 1984, and brought briefly up to date as one of Signal’s beautifully presented ‘Lost and Found’ series, is one of the saddest memoirs I’ve read.