This work is a Poetry Book Society recommended translation. Forms of Distance is Bei Dao’s second bilingual collection since his enforced exile from China in 1989. Michael Hofmann described the first, Old Snow , as ‘the work of one of the great poets of our time’, and John Cayley wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that ‘in a sense he is the only contemporary Chinese poet who is knowable for the non-specialist…we can hear the maturing poetic voice of a highly talented, individual Chinese writer.