Book Review - Mississippi Delta: Photographs by Jianqing Zheng

Put Me In the Water:

the blues of Jianqing Zheng's 'Mississippi Delta: Photographs'

Review By Jerome Berglund

 

If the old adage contending a picture's value appraises at equivalent to a thousand words be true, prolific writer and photog Jianqing Zheng’s luscious new volume of fine art photography may well represent among his most expansive and weighty contributions to English literature and art to date, deceptively hefty in its 100 gorgeous glossy pages of stunning black and white imagery, handsomely presented across eight well organized sections in predominantly full-page layouts, with occasional gray backdrops to preserve thoughtfully devised crops. 

Jerome Berglund

Designed elegantly by renowned photographer Leo Touchet, with whom Zheng previously collaborated unforgettably in a striking collection of ekphrastic dialogues between image and verse, this book represents a glorious achievement in documentarian prowess and vision, a source document of exciting ambition capturing with unique artistry and keen perceptiveness the distinctive aesthetic and inimitable tone of an underrepresented and highly valuable slice of Americana readers the world over can benefit enormously from basking in the rich immortalizing of. 

Through a lengthy, impressive career Jianqing has utilized an eclectic array of modes with letters, photographs, artwork, and charged hybrids or variations thereof, in the interest of preserving for posterity, communicating, and eloquently articulating the language and story of his gorgeous, woeful space, and has made marked contributions to heritages’ reverence so doing via prose, verse, micropoetry, and combinations of these approaches. But thanks to its incredible accessibility Mississippi Delta: Photographs represents one of his oeuvre's crowning achievements, with some of the most powerful impact, immediacy, clarity and universal appeal he has achieved in all his careful scholarship and intimate field research. 

A catalogue of memorable vignettes, superb scenes, exquisite moments, predominantly devoid of any interference by man or creature largely excepting a few birds and beasts, or the evidences of his having passed through and left a mark by structure, mural, signpost or monument, there is the feeling for the vicarious observer joining Zheng on his roaming of being an archaeologist traversing the ruins of a lost civilization, or an audience member at a drama observing the theater set after or before a show has begun and its players have taken the stage. Yet the inhabitants of this place, their profound feeling and dense culture and history are also always the most prominent characters of the scenes, infusing each with meaning and imbuing every frame with countless layers of complexity and depth which make for the most captivating facets at dialectic play with nature and the elements in timeless and storied configurations or waltzes.

This book also serves as a spectacular testament and exemplary resource for those interested in appreciating, understanding, and deploying the traditions, techniques, aesthetics of eastern poetics and artwork, a case study and master class in ideas of wabi-sabi, yugen, shasei which the author has demonstrated terrific command of and nuanced grasp employing across his poems and narratives elsewhere. But the beauty, strength, and potency of image is its economy, functionality, coherence across barriers of time, space, and most constructively language, so that these extraordinary contents can be as easily and readily appreciated in Peru as Japan as Nigeria or the continent of Antarctica. The commercial media, the accepted historian anthropologist and ethnographer, the press and magazine and Instagram story of our era has traditionally demonstrated a highly limiting focus on a few prominent beacons or hubs geographically, which omit, ignore, exclude, redact the larger, crucial portion of where humanity lives and dies, loves and conscientiously maintains, and it is integral, significant work remedying this tendency and tragedy. 

The contribution to revision and improvement to such policies books like this make to our shared understanding, memory and perspective cannot be underestimated, should be lauded and encouraged  enthusiastically. I hope as many people as possible have the opportunity to admire these fine art photographs and the instances in our age and this incredible landscape they commemorate. I can't recommend this outstanding book highly enough, to readers young and old, as well as formal artists, scholars and institutions.

Available here: https://photocirclepress.com/msdelta/msdelta-back.html

Jerome Berglund has published book reviews and essays on poetry and poetics in Cantos, Fireflies’ Light, Frogpond, Haiku Canada, Hooghly Review, the Mamba, North of Oxford, Setu, Valley Voices, also frequently exhibits poetry, short stories, plays, and fine art photography in print magazines, online journals, and anthologies.

Jianqing Zheng’s poetry books include A Way of Looking, The Dog Years of Reeducation, Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Delta Sun, and The Landscape of Mind. His edited books include African American Haiku: Cultural Visions and The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on his Haiku. He has received three poetry fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and teaches at Mississippi Valley State University, where he edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review. His latest publications are Still Motion, coauthored with Leo Touchet, and Delta Lenscapes Photoku. He has also published more than 20 photographic essays about the river and land of the Mississippi Delta, with topics of African American hospitals and clinics, country churches, shacks, cultural flavors of hot tamales, Emmett Till, Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Johnson, the river’s business, and ghost place in journals, including Arkansas Review, Integrite, Maine Digital Collaborative, Mississippi Folklife, and The Southern Quarterly. A few of his photographs were used on book or magazine covers.

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Setu, December 2025