Bàn về thơ Nguyễn Đình Minh

The transformation of real and fake  thicken the darkness in this world

The road to Tay Thien has not been taken yet, but lost

Suddenly understand why the bells are still anxiously ringing under the sky

And the nights of thousand years...

The sound of the wooden bell in  the pagodas is still choking forever!

I would like to start my personal little lines about Nguyen Dinh Minh's poetry in this collection of poems with the above lines. The haunting, symbolic, painful and insightful verses set the path humanity is on and, rather, going astray. I am reminded of the verses of the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize for literature at this time,In his verses, the world appears like a speck of dust full of church bell towers, filled with darkness and sin. The verses of poet Nguyen Dinh Minh take the image of the sound of the bells and wooden fish  in the pagoda wailing in the dark and blood flowing day by day to build up all that is going on in our small world.

The poet's vague and fear is the awakening of conscientious people in a chaotic world of values, uncleanness, greed, blindness, cruelty and misguidedness. Too many people and too many countries are foolishly rushing into the digitized world, the world 4.0, 5.0 and more with a wrong view. Reality is showing us: with every increase in these “numbers”, the madness of man increases. Man's biggest mistake right now is digitizing himself and digitizing the wondrous mysteries of life, digitizing the beauties of great ambiguities. The great thing is that the poet has recognized the signs of the death of human nature  in the changes that people mistake for progress and civilization.

Please listen to the verses below, the verses resound in pure tears and like a cry of despair filled with humanity.

In our time, the six sides roared with the holy wind and tsunami

Computer mouse gradually gnaws fairytale dreams

Electric incense burning soulless reduces the sacredness of the anniversary of the ancestors' death

Nobody asked which egg I started with

in a hundred fairy eggs?

All the above verses are the whole reality of the life we ​​live. That reality is misleading people about life values, about a world called civilization. Human beings are arrogant with inventions of ''computer mouse'', ''electric incense sticks'' their own and are happily enjoying those inventions. But the poet has seen the death of humanity, of the beauties of the soul that have made humankind  since then. The means are just to help people reach the most effective way human values and discovers new beauties of life not the purpose of life. But people are going astray. These are truly ecstatic verses filled with pain. Beautiful fairy tales of all times resound in the voices of grandmothers and mothers, trembling incense sticks lit on ancestral altars or in sacred places are truly sacred ceremonies of human life. When people lose such rituals, people have left eternal values of human spiritual life.

Every day, people wake up in a hurry to look to the emotionless screens of iphone, ipad, computer, television, etc. Let's wonder how many people wake up sitting in silence to listen to the birdsong coming from out in the garden, welcome the passing wind of changing seasons or watch an autumn cloud drift across the sky….and think about the good things of the day to come. We are moving away from true and eternal beauties and into the enticing world of insensitivity, illusion, and lowly material desires. We are cutting ourselves off from our harmony with nature and cutting ourselves off from ourselves. We are using something insensitive to connect us with nature and with people. We are mistaking about our values and we are destroying our souls.

Is domain 4.0 heaven?

Is there enough peace and in harmony with rain and sun?

The seed of the sweetheart is sown, will the tree bear bitter fruit

Still have an appointment with country flavor

Late night drinking a cup of moonlight?

It is a scary thing that people are calling on society to approach and consider technology 4.0 or 5.0 as the survival of a country while the calls and warnings about an insensitive world, away from nature, away from people are forgotten.

The countries that invent advanced technologies are the countries that are urgently calling for people to return to nature and the priceless spiritual values ​​that mankind has created. One of Hollywood's biggest themes is warning about the danger of technology's domination over people because it's the domination of emotionlessness, digitization, and emotional ice.

Remember that airplanes, cars and products of digital technology are just means but not the goal of the path to happiness. I remember the story of the Japanese writer Oe Kenzaburo, the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose son was mentally disabled. More than ten years old, the boy is still unable to speak even though Oe has taken him to all the most modern hospitals in Japan and some advanced countries. But one summer, he took his son to vacation in the countryside

In the afternoon, he carried his disabled son along the road running along a forest. Suddenly, one afternoon, he heard the voice of his speechless son calling out: "Father, the bird is calling". He was stunned. He put the child down and look at him as if for the first time in his life. It was then that he realized theRhododendron bird  in the forest was crying passionately. Nature with its fragile and magnificent beauty has become a miracle. That child heard the sound of rhododendrons bird in the afternoons when his father carried him along the forest path and the sound of birds opened his soul and awakened the strange potentialities in him. Later he became a musician.

In the poems in this collection of poems, I have heard the rhododendron ringing. It is the sound of pure and wondrous beauties being overwhelmed and ravaged by the world of emotionless means and gradually dominate. That cry has established the poet's soul, redefining the mission of poetry and once again establish the values ​​of life.

The poems in this collection of poems have changed me a lot in my view of poet Nguyen Dinh Minh's poetry. The greatest fear for man is the death of emotions and the sacredness and the greatest warning of poets of all times and of all cultures is a warning of that death. All the poems in this collection of poems, whether directly or indirectly, make up the great message of the poet. That is the poet's emotional state of mind, the poet's soul and the poet's mission.

Poetry will have no meaning if not open the human beauties and warn of what led to the death of that beauty.

Poet Nguyen Dinh Minh recognized the path leading to human death and raised his voice.

The peaceful residence of people is the heart

But it’s turned into a prison for the enemy and filled with poison!

Why not open the door to let it be filled with love light

Like our infinite and eternal nature?

Or are we dead?...

“Or are we dead?” of poet Nguyen Dinh Minh and also a question I have heard in the artistic texts of poets and 
artists around the world in recent centuries. Man is carrying within themself mental paranoia. People mistakenly 
believe that technology is helping them to erase distances, boundaries...but the truth with the way people understand 
technology and are becoming slaves of technology is that people have started to close the doors of their souls to
 this whole universe: nature and people. No one opposes inventions in any human field, so does poet Nguyen Dinh Minh
. But the poet opposes human error in the products of such technological inventions. The world 4.0 is just a symbol 
where the poet talks about an era when people have lost their trembling and sacred emotions. The image of the 'gateway 4.0' 
and the village gate are two contrasting images. An open gate draws people into the void, the unknown and a gate opens for
 people to return to the beauties of the origin.

Now people are waiting in front of gate 4.0

The region has no border, no longer longitude and latitude

Ethnicity, skin color… and people are the codes

Heart is a commodity?

…………………… 

The village gate is like a spiritual pyramid

Though on this earth, diamonds are as numerous as the desert sands

It's just…  honestly unknown

Who are we waiting for?

Know how to go through the world to return to the village?

I again want to cite  here the Hollywood movie productions. Because perhaps America is one of the most accurate examples of human awakening in this digital world. There are many people who have digitized their brain systems and become emotionless and sadistic people. Those people lost all their memories. But it is these digitized people who desire more than anyone else to find their own origin: the origin of a human being. And Japan, after the terrible tsunami a few years ago, has a whole project called "recovery of memories". That project is from the University of Tokyo. University of Tokyo professors and students have been searching for relics of Japanese people in the city that was flattened by the tsunami, such as a photograph of a family member, a beanie a mother knitted as a gift. for a daughter, a ceramic vase that usually holds a wife's flowers. And when the city government plans to rebuild the lost city, the people ask them to rebuild the city like the city where they were born, raised, lived and worked with the roofs The old tile, the old gate and the cherry trees at the front of the house. I refer to the stories of America and Japan to once again declare that it is the countries that produce the most advanced technological products of mankind that are the ones that best understand the value of spiritual and cultural life. And these evidences to once again talk about the value of poems that poet Nguyen Dinh Minh wrote.

People today are actually in decline, stepping back into the dark but mistakenly thinking that they are smarter than their ancestors, mistakenly thinking that they are moving into the future with inventions, Inventions can replace people. Humans have succeeded in cloning Dolly the sheep, can clone the human body but can never clone the soul. This spirit is more evident than ever in the entire collection of poems. And all the verses in this collection of poems by poet Nguyen Dinh Minh are painful messages about a death - human nature death.

Ha Dong, 10/08/2019