4.0
Songs of Love, Moon, & Wind
ByPublisher Description
“Nothing stands still in this poetry: the wind blows the trees, the lake water ripples and the ever-present road runs in and out of the hills.”—American Poetry Review
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.
—Ch’ien Ch’i
This exquisite gift book offers a wide sampling of Chinese verse, from the first century to our own time, beginning with the lyric poetry of Tu Fu, moving to the folk songs of the Six Dynasties Period, on to the Sung Dynasty, and to the present. Also represented are some of the best-known women of Chinese poetry, including Li Ching-chao and Chu Shu-chen. These simple, accessible but profound poems come through to us with a breathtaking immediacy in Kenneth Rexroth’s English versions—a wonderful gift for any lover of poetry.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSongs of Love, Moon, & Wind Reviews
4.0
“Rexroth is probably my favorite translator of Classical Chinese poetry. This small volume collects selections from his several books of translation, and is a wonderful intro to his work.
All the old gang is here: Lu Yu, Wang Wei, Li Ch’ing-Chai, Su Tung-P’o, Lady P’ang…. (The one conspicuous absence is Li Po. I don’t know the story there).
The poems are full of detail, profoundly felt, and with an attractive overall philosophy. Poems celebrating the seasons, poems of war, of licit and illicit love, of the incredible richness and grandeur of blossoms, the night sky, of huts and hermits; these works are of astonishing beauty and depth, and once you pay them a little attention, they’ll remain faithfully by your side for the remainder of your days.”
About Kenneth Rexroth
Poet-essayist Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) was a high-school dropout, disillusioned ex-Communist, pacifist, anarchist, rock-climber, critic and translator, mentor, Catholic-Buddhist spiritualist and a prominent figure of San Francisco's Beat scene. He is regarded as a central figure of the San Francisco Renaissance and is among the first American poets to explore traditional Japanese forms such as the haiku.
Other books by Kenneth Rexroth
Eliot Weinberger
Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.
Other books by Eliot Weinberger
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