From Songs of the Fighting Crickets

Abstract:Actor, playwright, and poet Pich Tum Kravel was one of the most famous performing artists in the 1960s and 1970s. After the Khmer Rouge regime ended, he was instrumental in restoring Cambodian arts from the 1980s until his death in 2015. "The Ox with the Broken Hoof" is written in me buon meter (four lines of four syllables), a very compressed form often used in folk songs. "Man and Krasang" is composed in Crow's Gait meter (seven-line stanzas of four syllables per line). "The Sun Turns Leprous" takes up a classical Khmer theme, since the fall of Angkor, of the "upside down world"—its surreal images of eclipses and comets draw on traditional Asian prophecies. cm/sm