Author Do Quang Nghia has lived and worked in Germany for many years. He is rich in emotions, imbued with feelings, carrying in his mind the vibrations of distant love in his youth, unfinished stories on a street corner in Hanoi, after many years of wandering, still filled his poems, never fading away.
Notably, Do Quang Nghia is not a professional writer. He studied at Ilmenau Technical University (Germany) and Hanoi University of Science and Technology. Observers often use the term “block A” or “technical” to refer to authors who do not study literature or pursue a literary career, but have a love and natural talent for poetry.
Do Quang Nghia's poetry is unique and easily recognizable right from his first works. Not only because the structure of his poetry is different, but also because the emotions have their own structure.
Many of his poems have no titles, just beginning with an asterisk (*). His poems are also not presented in a conventional structure. There are poems that are long and rambling, filling up the page, while others are short and concise, with only 3 to 5 lines of poetry. Some lines are just one word.
Do Quang Nghia is "irregular" in his poetic structure. His rhyming is also special.
Do Quang Nghia's poetry in the collection "Like Autumn" is an emotional juggling with language. Feeling, he enters the world of words, looks, thinks and rearranges everything "neatly" according to his own rules, sometimes according to the linear time, sometimes the suddenness of the stream of thoughts, sometimes poetry flows from invisible reminders and remembrances.
The most special thing in Do Quang Nghia's poetry is the way he plays with words, the way he juggles with language, according to the rules of "block A people", so that each verse and poem reminds the reader of calculation, logic, and rigor like an equation with a formula for finding a solution.
“... After the last farewell/There were still meetings/But we both knew/Before that/It was the last farewell”, or the verses, “Once I put the sun into poetry/Once I put poetry into the sun...”, “... You came and went/I forgot and went away/More than ten years, there is no way out...”...
Love in Do Quang Nghia's poetry is colorful and varied, but the heaviest are youthful thoughts, unfinished things left unsaid, past love that smolders throughout life.
Reading his poems, one can clearly see the feelings he left behind on every corner of Hanoi when he left. That soul, after many years, has never been able to leave Hanoi, the Red River, the motherland. The street corner of the date, the green trees, the Red River in flood season, the vows by the riverside with the girl from the past... still linger, still haunt, still flow in Do Quang Nghia's memory, and are put into his poems, sometimes as endless as an illusion, sometimes as real as if you could touch it.
“Block A people” with the soul of an artist when wandering in a faraway land have gone through all the gains and losses of life, the experiences, the profound insights of life. He put everything into poetry, he hid it in a language system that was structured with calculation and arrangement but could not hide the emotions, the longing, the aspirations in the family story and the pain of people in exile, the feeling of pain so great that it could come back even if only lightly touched when remembering a familiar street corner.
