The August Sleepwalker is a great book; I highly recommend it. Here is a poem from the collection:

An End or a Beginning
           for Yu Luoke

Here I stand
Replacing another, who has been murdered
So that each time the sun rises
A heavy shadow, like a road
Shall run across the land

A sorrowing mist
Covers the uneven patchwork of roofs
Between one house and another
Chimneys spout ashy crowds
Warmth effuses from gleaming trees
Lingering on the wretched cigarette stubs
Low black clouds arise
From every tired hand

In the name of the sun
Darkness plunders openly
Silence is still the story of the East
People on age-old frescoes
Silently live forever
Silently die and are gone

Ah, my beloved land
Why don't you sing any more
Can it be true that even the ropes of the Yellow River
      towmen
Like sundered lute-strings
Reverberate no more
True that time, this dark mirror
Has also turned its back on you forever
Leaving only stars and drifting clouds behind

I look for you
In every dream
Every foggy night or morning
I look for spring and apple trees
Every wisp of breeze stirred up by honey bees
I look for the seashore's ebb and flow
The seagulls formed from sunlight on the waves
I look for the stories built into the wall
Your forgotten name and mine

If fresh blood could make you fertile
The ripened fruit
On tomorrow's branches
Would bear my colour

I must admit
That I trembled
In the death-white chilly light
Who wants to be a meteorite
Or a martyr's ice-cold statue
Watching the unextinguished fire of youth
Pass into another's hand
Even if doves alight on its shoulder
It can't feel their bodies' warmth and breath
They preen their wings
And quickly fly away

I am a man
I need love
I long to pass each tranquil dusk
Under my love's eyes
Waiting in the cradle's rocking
For the child's first cry
On the grass and fallen leaves
On every sincere gaze
I write poems of life
This universal longing
Has now become the whole cost of being a man

I have lied many times
In my life
But I have always honestly kept to
The promise I made as a child
So that the world which cannot tolerate
A child's heart
Has still not forgiven me

Here I stand
Replacing another, who has been murdered
I have no other choice
And where I fall
Another will stand
A wind rests on my shoulders
Stars glimmer in the wind

Perhaps one day
The sun will become a withered wreath
To hand before
The growing forest of gravestones
Of each unsubmitting fighter
Black crows the night's tatters
Flock thick around

The August Sleepwalker by Bei Dao translated by Bonnie S. McDougall
http://www.amazon.com/August-Sleepwalker-Beidao/dp/0811211320/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322331248&sr=8-1

3 poems from The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems by Bei Dao

UNTITLED

Stretch out your hands to me
don't let the world blocked by my shoulder
disturb you any longer
if love is not forgotten
hardship leaves no memory
remember what I say
not everything will pass
if there is only one last aspen
standing tall at the end of the road
like a gravestone without an epitaph
the falling leaves will also speak
fading paling as they tumble
slowly they freeze over
holding our heavy footprints
of course, no one knows tomorrow
tomorrow begins from another dawn
when we will be fast asleep

~

DECLARATION
for Yu Luoke

Perhaps the final hour is come
I have left no testament
Only a pen, for my mother
I am no hero
In an age without heroes
I just want to be a man

The still horizon
Divides the ranks of the living and the dead
I can only choose the sky
I will not kneel on the ground
Allowing the executioners to look tall
The better to obstruct the wind of freedom

From star-like bullet holes shall flow
A blood-red dawn

~

COMPOSITION

stars in the stream and stops at the source

diamond rain
is ruthlessly dissecting
the glass world

it opens the sluice, opens
a woman's lips
pricked on a man's arm

opens the book
the words have decomposed, the ruins
have imperial integrity

http://www.amazon.com/Rose-Time-Bilingual-Directions-Paperbook/dp/0811218481/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296543172&sr=1-1

I'm reading so many stunning poems by Bei Dao.

From the Preface of The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems by Bei Dao

“I was born in 1949 in Beijing. As Chairman Mao declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China from the rostrum in Tiananmen Square, I was lying in my cradle no more than a thousand yards away. My fate seems to have been intertwined with that of China ever since. I received a privileged, but brief, education. I was a student at the best high school in Beijing, until the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966. All the schools were closed, and three years later I was assigned to work in the state-run construction industry. I worked as a concrete mixer for five years, and then another six years as a blacksmith. This experience of hard labor, living at the bottom of society, eventually helped me a great deal. It broadened my understanding of life in a way that was tangible and material, something that books could hardly be capable of achieving.

It was under those harsh circumstances of life that I began my creative writing. I finished the first draft of a novella, Waves, in a darkroom, while supposedly developing photos for a propaganda exhibition about the construction site. That was one of the grimmest periods of contemporary China, when reading and writing were forbidden games. But underground creative writing was breaking through the frozen shell of the earth.

On December 2, 1978, I, together with some friends, launched the first non-official literary journal in China since 1949, Today. The “misty” or “obscure” poetry – a pejorative term applied by the authorities – that appeared in Today was able to challenge the dominance of the official social discourse by opening new space, new possibilities for the Chinese language. Inevitably, the journal was banned after two years of its existence, but it began a new phase in the history of Chinese literature.

Berlin in 1989 marked the beginning of my life in exile. For the next four years, I lived in six countries in Europe. Today was revived in 1990, and has continued to be published abroad ever since. It remains the only Chinese avant-garde literary journal whose existence transcends geographic boundaries. As its chief editor, I have been engaged, alongside writers within China, in a long-term literary resistance – not only to the hegemony of the official discourse, but also to the degree of commercialization throughout the world.  A once-mimeographed journal floating across the oceans has managed to survive in environments where other languages are spoken.

In truth, I am not quite confident about my writing when I look back. It reminds me of those days of blacksmithing, when I was frustrated by the iron works I had made. I realize that a poet and a blacksmith are much alike: both of them chase after a perfect dream that is unrealizable. I once, in an early poem, wrote the lines: “freedom is nothing but the distance/ between the hunter and the hunted.” It is the predicament, as well, of writing poetry. In this sense, you are both hunter and hunted, but poetry is the distance like freedom.”