Part 1
Sehwa
flowing words
trapped person
Higher than the heart
black cat
reflux
Labyrinth of Silence
Bird in the hand
Sooted night
complicated person
Black Walk

Part 2
The husk of light
In other countries
Snowman on the Beach
International Date Line
Like a dull finger piercing through a thin plastic film
mute
Dream of Zero Gravity
Trapeze
flat wave
November
Opaque eternity

Part 3
Outside of sadness
curfew
At the hospital main gate
Outside of sadness
Whose shoes were those that day?
How far have we come?
Outside of sadness
Spider Woman
The boy rolling the hoop
Silence
The reservoir in my ear

Part 4
hot hand
Break the fishbowl
human condition
handshake
Ghost play
Buttoned up night
Black sheet music
Red Tower of Babel
Heavy rain passed
Without even ending credits

Commentary | Nam Seung-won
Poet's words

“Some memories are engraved in the heart.
“Every time my heart beats, it spreads through my blood vessels throughout my body.”
A lament of sorrow and love lifted from the depths of life

Poet Shin Cheol-gyu, who has received much attention for his poetry that captures the sadness and boundaries of everyday life through intense gaze and beautiful imagination, has published his second collection of poems, "Higher than the Heart," under Changbi Poetry.
The poet, who won the 2019 Shin Dong-yup Literary Award for his first poetry collection, “They Say It Was as Sad as the Earth,” with praise for “approaching the deep wounds and sorrows of people of the same age,” delicately depicts the tragic landscape of the world in this collection with a voice as vibrant as a heartbeat.
The poems in "Higher than the Heart" depict the fundamental sorrow of humanity in desperate language, while at the same time striving to reach out to the suffering of others without sinking into their own sorrow.
The poet faces a reality full of pain and captures the history of violence and the tears of his contemporaries in his poetry.
The will to weave together the sorrows of others and myself, and the gentle yet powerful metaphors, evoke a profound emotion.
The true heart conveyed in "Higher Than the Heart" begins with exquisite metaphors and vivid images that have been greatly appreciated by readers.
Based on his compassionate sensitivity, he remembers “people who whine and cry like fish without vocal organs” (“The Sooted Night”) and strives to reach a true understanding of humanity.
With his unique and delicate observational skills, he depicts a landscape in which “drops of water form even on the most fragile spider webs” (“like a blunt finger penetrating a thin plastic film”), and hopes to gaze at it with readers for a long time.

A desperate voice recording the pain of the times

Even in the midst of the painful times of living in “the world after the disaster of sinking,” the poet records the sorrow of our society in poetry based on the ethical consciousness of “aligning my sad heart with the aching heart of others” (Kim Seung-hee, recommendation).
For the poet, sadness is not something that is unique to him, and the suffering of others is not unrelated to his own.
The title piece, "Higher than the Heart," shows the imagination of solidarity that begins with the small pain and fear felt in everyday life in the bathtub, and continues to understand the sorrow of others and sympathize with the violence of the times.
It bears witness to the sorrowful suffering of a time when “things that could not be broken collapsed and things that should not sink sank,” and connects the bonds of solidarity that were connected through sorrow.
The voice of pain that the poet seeks to record is not limited to today's sorrow.
For example, in “Sehwa,” the poet writes heavily about the pain of the April 3 Incident.
The speaker stands in today's Jeju, on the beautiful beach of Sehwa, but the poem remembers the violence and endless sorrow that have continued for a long time with the sentence, "In front of those who want to kill / Those who want to survive inevitably become rioters."
In his poetry, sadness is not a temporary emotion, but a result of the damage caused by violence, and its true nature is a real problem.
Therefore, 『Higher than the Heart』 is a “chronicle of wounds and pain” (Nam Seung-won, commentary) and a elegy to remember the pain of the times.

A poet who is still weeping, helplessly crushed by the violence inherent in the absurd social structure and driven to the edge of life's cliff, will record the shadows of the times, yearning for "a handful of salvation" ("At the Hospital Gate"), a warmth that surpasses any consolation.
Shin Cheol-gyu's poetry again and again extends a warm hand toward "the hand that rises to hold your hand when you try to put your hand in the water" ("Opaque Eternity").


Poet's words

Words that keep lingering and words that keep repeating.
Just as transparent things change color depending on changes in temperature and density,
Words whose weight changes depending on the accumulation of thoughts and the path of thoughts.


Those words brought me here.


Like the sole survivor of a tribal community
A person who can't talk to anyone
I often think that it might be me soon.
Any conversation seems to be turning into a monologue.

Everything that appears in dreams
These are things that are not next to me right now.
I became human for a little while
Most of the time we live as non-humans.

With people you can't hate
Words filled with misunderstandings
There are times when you can't give up.
I am holding onto my absurdly broken heart and putting together the pieces of humanity.

March 2022
Shin Cheol-gyu