Every literary journey leaves behind more than memories; it leaves books bearing the voices of the people and places encountered along the way. During the 6th Silk Road International Poetry and Art Festival, which brought together writers, poets, translators, and artists across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, I had the privilege of receiving a remarkable collection of books directly from their authors.

Each volume was offered not merely as a gift, but as an invitation to enter a distinct cultural landscape, to discover another language of memory, history, imagination, and identity. In this series of articles, I will present these works one by one, offering reviews that go beyond summary to explore their literary merit, cultural significance, and the conversations they create across borders. Together, these books form a living library of the contemporary Silk Road, where literature continues to unite civilizations through the enduring power of the written word.

Lian Tao’s That Touch of Green in My Heart: Poetry Rooted in Memory, Work and the Human Spirit

Xi’an, China — That Touch of Green in My Heart, the poetry collection by Chinese writer and poet Lian Tao, brings together a body of deeply personal verse shaped by professional experience, travel, friendship, nature, memory, and an enduring belief in the dignity of ordinary life. Rather than pursuing elaborate poetic theories or rigid formal structures, Lian Tao writes from direct experience, allowing emotion, observation and spontaneous reflection to become the foundation of his poetry.

Born in Louguan Town, Zhouzhi County, Shaanxi Province, Lian Tao has spent much of his professional life in journalism, public communication and cultural work. He served as head of an enterprise publicity department, head of a Party Committee work department and Party Secretary, and also worked as a reporter for China Civil Aviation News and head of its Xi’an bureau. He is a member of several literary organizations, including the China Prose Writers Association, Shaanxi Provincial Writers Association and Shaanxi Provincial Poetry Society. His literary career has included the editing of six collections of enterprise culture essays, while his own essays and poems have appeared in numerous major newspapers and literary periodicals.

His published essay collection, The Sea in My Heart, established another dimension of his literary work. That Touch of Green in My Heart now extends that journey into poetry, revealing a writer whose literary impulse emerges naturally from the world around him.

The collection has received warm attention from established Chinese literary figures. In a preface, poet and senior literary editor Shang Zhen describes Lian Tao’s poetry as an authentic expression of feelings, experiences and moments of insight. Shang Zhen emphasizes that Lian Tao does not appear to write according to predetermined poetic rules; instead, he writes freely and spontaneously, seeking to convey what he genuinely feels and thinks.

This freedom is central to the character of the collection. Lian Tao’s poetry does not attempt to separate everyday experience from poetic experience. His subjects range across the countryside and the city, nature and work, friendship and family, travel and memory, social observation and private reflection. As Shang Zhen observes, Lian Tao writes about what he has personally experienced, what he has observed, and what he has thought about—the world outside him as well as the human heart within.

The poem that gives the collection its title, “That Touch of Green in My Heart,” provides a particularly revealing example of this approach. The poem turns the airport runway and the people who work around it into a landscape of metaphor and human meaning. Airport personnel, commanders and police officers become part of a collective portrait of responsibility, discipline and devotion. The runway becomes a white silk road, a piano keyboard, a bowstring and even a reclining dragon, while the “silver eagle” of the aircraft becomes an image of movement, aspiration and possibility.

The poem ultimately transforms the airport from a workplace into a symbolic space connecting human effort with dreams, journeys and friendship. The runway carries hopes outward while bringing happiness and human connection back. In this sense, the collection’s “green” is not merely a color but a poetic sign of life, renewal, memory and inner vitality.

The range of titles included in the volume confirms the breadth of Lian Tao’s poetic imagination. Poems such as “Spring Festival to Friends,” “Don’t Drink,” “Thinking about the Stock Market,” “Mid-Autumn Festival to Friends,” “On the Way to Work,” “Ancient City, Another Dawn,” “Snowflake,” “At the Foot of Qinling Mountains,” “In the Rain,” “To the Danube,” “Kasumigaura,” “Oasis of Life,” and “Drunk Song” reveal a poet attentive to both the immediate details of daily life and the wider geography of memory and travel.

The collection also contains poems inspired by places and journeys, including New Zealand, Taiwan, Qinghai Lake and Jiegu Town, alongside poems addressed to friends, classmates and family. “Mom,” “Morning Reading,” “The Early Spring Sunshine Is So Nice,” and several festival and New Year greetings demonstrate the importance of personal relationships and seasonal rhythms in his poetic world.

Another striking feature of Lian Tao’s writing is the relationship between poetry and professional life. His experience in the aviation world is not treated simply as background biography; it becomes a source of imagery and reflection. The airport appears as a community of people whose work embodies responsibility and commitment. The physical order of the runway becomes, in the poet’s imagination, an outward expression of the character of those who maintain it.

Shang Zhen’s personal recollection of meeting Lian Tao at Xi’an Xianyang International Airport in 2018 reinforces this connection between the poet and his world. He remembers Lian Tao as sincere, modest and devoted to poetry—a person whose character left an impression even after a brief encounter.

That Touch of Green in My Heart therefore emerges as more than a conventional poetry collection. It is a literary portrait of a man who has moved through journalism, public service, aviation, travel and cultural life while maintaining a strong attachment to writing. Its poems find poetry in the runway, the mountains, snow, rain, friendship, family, cities and ordinary moments.

At its heart, the collection embodies Lian Tao’s simple but powerful creative philosophy: writing is an act of happiness, freedom and truthful expression. As reflected in the introductory commentary, he writes because writing gives him joy and because it allows him to present his feelings and thoughts without artificial restraint.

With That Touch of Green in My Heart, Lian Tao invites readers into a poetic world where professional duty meets personal memory, where landscapes become emotional maps, and where everyday experience can unexpectedly reveal the beauty of existence. It is a collection grounded in life—and, precisely for that reason, reaching toward poetry.