Poetry. Translated from the Japanese by John Balcom. Traces of Rilke are unearthed in Lo Fu's long poem sequence, DRIFTWOOD, along with his affection for surrealism and the early modernists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire adn the more contemporary verse of Wallace Stevens. On New Year's Day 2001, the poem appeared in the literary supplement to the Library Times in Taiwan and was serialized for three months straight. Lo Fu has won almost every literary award in Taiwan and has published more than three dozen volumes of poetry, essays, criticism and translations. Despite his prolific output, Lo Fu considers DRIFTWOOD to be the book that sums up his experience of exile, his artistic explorations and his metaphysics; DRIFTWOOD is a personal epic and the greatest achievement of his old age.