Re-reading Moonlight, Sitting sadly remembering my mother in the past in 'Nguyen Duy's Poetry'

Poet Nguyen Duy is one of the typical poetic voices in Vietnamese literature. He is highly appreciated for his Luc Bat poetry form, a poetic form that seems easy to write, but to write well and deeply is not easy.

Reading Nguyen Duy's poetry, readers feel the simplicity, tenderness and lyricism, but still carry deep contemplation and philosophy. The selected edition of Nguyen Duy's Poetry has just been republished with a new cover, including poems that helped him leave a deep impression on readers.

Mother lulls the senses into life, milk nourishes the body, song nourishes the soul

From White Sand (1973) to Dust (1997), his poetry is a journey to find the beauty of ordinary things, a beauty full of philosophy that, according to critic Do Lai Thuy: "Nguyen Duy knows how to create cases of anti-aerobic, anti-philosophical poetry to bring in the oxygen of folk philosophy".

Many of Nguyen Duy's poems have touched the hearts of readers and become the common memories of many generations. Particularly, Sitting sadly remembering our mother in the past - one of the outstanding poems in this collection, is a gentle but moving memorial piece about maternal love.

There, the image of a hard-working mother and simple lullabies have become symbols: "I have lived my entire human life / but I still cannot finish listening to all the lullabies my mother sang"; "Mother sings the way of life / milk nourishes the body, songs nourish the soul / grandmothers sing to their mothers / will you still remember in the future?"

Editor for the Nguyen Duy Poetry edition, editor and book author Nguyen Hoang Dieu Thuy confided to Tuoi Tre Online that she read the poem Sitting sadly missing my mother when she was a literature student and was very moved because he described the longing for one's mother so delicately:

"When I became a mother, and understood more deeply the maternal journey of my mother and other women, I felt much more moved by the poem. Writing about mothers is very difficult, because we always feel like we cannot say enough, or cannot say anything different from what others have said a lot.

But Nguyen Duy still brings very special images from familiar materials. From "the shadow of mother on earth in the past" evokes a hard-working and miserable image to "my heart - the wet place where mother lies on a rainy night" is the tearfulness of an orphan, I think the poem touches the bottom of the heart of all those who have a mother in the world".