Ahn Jeong-geun, a poet who expresses a range of emotions and everyday life through plain and warm poetic language, has published his fourth poetry collection, I Become Your Landscape (Munye-won). He is Professor, Department of English Language & Literature, Jeonbuk National University (JBNU).

Since first publishing in 2015 the long-kept fragments of his poetry in A Star in My Pocket, the poet has released collections of warmly worded poems roughly every two years.

The poet, who renders the diverse fragments of life, the connections among objects in daily life, and depictions of relationships in simple poetic diction, once again unfolds the lyrical realm he has always shown in this collection.

In this fourth collection, readers can encounter a series of linked poems that focus on the relationships with objects that he has maintained in his poetic work. They can also find poems that offer glimpses of his thoughts, as a linguist, on the nature and pragmatics of language.

His poems have tended to focus less on fragmentary depictions of poetic objects and more on descriptions of the mutual relationships those objects have with their surroundings. As the title of this collection suggests, it is a relationship in which I become your landscape and you become my landscape.

Divided into three subthemes — 'The Fire in My Heart,' 'Sometimes Lost in Deep Thought,' and 'That Day When It Sparkles' — readers can glimpse the poet's self who 'sometimes drifts away,' 'sometimes sinks into thought,' and 'sometimes becomes prickly and writes.'

In this collection as well, the poet approaches readers with modest and delicate yet as-easy-as-possible language. This comes from his conviction that writing should not be difficult, and from his belief that obscure writing or dull thinking cannot elicit empathy and leaves no trace.

Therefore, the poet says, composing poetry is a gaze that soothes wounds and leaves quiet traces within us that allow life to be reexamined.

'Times change, and I change too. Yet when I write, there I am—my writing that is true to me.'

As the poet's words at the outset suggest, perhaps for him writing—or poetry—is precisely himself.

Poet Ahn Jeong-geun is a native of Jeonju. He graduated from the Department of English Language & Literature, Jeonbuk National University (JBNU), and studied at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1987. Since 1989, he has served as a professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at JBNU.