`The August Sleepwalker' introduces the remarkable poetry of China's foremost younger poet, Bei Dao, one of the most gifted and controversial writers to emerge from the massive upheavals of modern China. His poetry reflects - and criticises - the conflicts of the `cultural revolution' of the late sixties and early seventies. His disillusion with the destructiveness of those times has made him an outsider, one of a group of underground poets who created an alternative literature to challenge the ...