Mao Zedong, leader of the revolution and absolute chairman of the People's Republic of China, was also a calligrapher and a poet of extraordinary grace and eloquent simplicity. The poems in this beautiful edition (from the 1963 Beijing edition), translated and introduced by Willis Barnstone, are expressions of decades of struggle, the painful loss of his first wife, his hope for a new China, and his ultimate victory over the Nationalist forces. Willis Barnstone's introduction, his short biography of Mao and brief history of the revolution, and his notes on Chinese versification all combine to enrich the Western reader's understanding of Mao's poetry.

Jervey Tervalon's novel about young people in South Central Los Angeles grows out of his experience teaching in a high school there and his pain at the death of one of his favorite students.

Summary This is a book to help students of Chinese increase their familiarity with Chinese culture and strengthen their command of the language. The book presents, in a unique format, 28 short couplets (5 character or 7 character cut-shorts) comprising Chinese poems all very well known to Chinese nationals. Explanatory notes for each poem are provided in English, and translations are given at the end of the book. This is an ideal textbook for both students and teachers wanting to incorporate Chinese poetry into their study curriculum. Blurb This is a book that every student of Chinese will want to buy. For the first time, Chinese poems are presented in an accessible form, with the characters, their pronunciation, and their English meaning all alongside each other, together with text in English providing insight on the poet, the cultural context and historical background for each one. English versions of all the poems are at the end of the book. Poems are an important part of Chinese culture, and the ones included here are some of the best known, studied by Chinese schoolchildren from an early age. For foreign students of Chinese, these poems present a unique opportunity to get to know the culture and to strengthen their command of the language at the same time. All of the poems here are classics, and their study provides an entry into Chinese literature far more readily than immersion in weighty novels. Each poem is short and easy to assimilate; memorising the poems, both to write and to declaim, helps to embed the characters in the mind, and to build up confidence in reading, writing and speaking the language. The poems are presented in such a way that the tools are available to understand each one, but the reader has the opportunity to come to their own conclusion as to the interpretation of the poem - in exactly the same way as an established scholar of Chinese might do. Reading a Chinese poem is a bit like solving a riddle, and indeed, the information and clues provided here are sufficient to allow even someone with no previous knowledge of Chinese to appreciate the beauty of these poems.

Poetry. Written under the spell of a medieval Welsh poetic form, the poems in Anthony Madrid's incantatory second book, TRY NEVER, each offer up their own strange world. They're full of erudition, humor, and rare magnificence. A single poem can contain "bottles and cans," Mount Everest, an upset stomach, Texas rain, a hawk, the evil queen, a "twice- mended lid," and Ralph; as if to say, anything's possible.

Anyone who reads The Book of Jade will quickly notice a few things: the author of this collection of poems holds a pessimistic, misanthropic view of life, and his obsessions lean towards the macabre, particularly focusing on themes of death, darkness, graves, corpses, and a longing to rest among the worms. The collection presents a world where God is portrayed as foolish, other people as imbeciles, and the fate of the dead as something to be envied. Certainly not light-hearted fare! Although The Book of Jade was initially published anonymously, it didn’t take long for readers to discover the identity of its author when the obituary of David Park Barnitz, a young oriental studies scholar who passed away mere weeks after the book’s publication, admitted as much. Though somewhat uneven in quality, the work has garnered admiration from figures such as H. P. Lovecraft, Donald Wandrei, and Clark Ashton Smith, firmly establishing its place in the canon of decadent literature. This edition includes all the poems of the original 1901 edition, as well as the poem “After-Life,” which was published in Overland Monthly. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

The Homeric epics and the Book of Songs are not just the fountainheads of the Western and Chinese literary traditions; for centuries they played a central role in education and communal life, and thus exercised a lasting influence on both civilizations. This volume presents the first systematic comparison of the two corpora. Part One analyzes their genesis and their reception, while Part Two discusses their characteristics as poetic creations. The book brings together Chinese and Western sinologists and classicists, and so promotes significant interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue. Though the contributors rank among the leading experts in their fields, the essays here are accessible not only to their peers, but also to the interested ‘general reader’, and so to all those who seek a deeper understanding of Chinese and Western civilizations, their common human basis and their characteristic differences.

Shi Zhi has been a major force in Chinese poetry since 1968, when several of his poems were circulated as secret handwritten manuscripts in the midst of China’s Cultural Revolution. He gave voice to the aspirations of dispirited youth, and although once relegated to obscurity, he is today celebrated as one of China’s most important cultural influences, having spawned the modern Chinese poetry revolution of the 1980s. This collection of Shi Zhi’s most significant poems, featuring an afterword by the poet himself, is the first book-length publication of his work in English. Born as Guo Lusheng in 1948, at the height of the Chinese Civil War, Shi Zhi joined the People’s Liberation Army at the age of twenty-three. Discharged early, he entered into a period of severe depression and spent much of the next three decades living in mental hospitals under harsh conditions. Taking the pen name of Shi Zhi, meaning “index finger,” to evoke the image of people pointing at his back, he continued to write poetry through these tumultuous years, chronicling his journey from the heights of fame to the depths of institutionalism and ultimately to a final redemptive return to society in 2005. The voice of this besieged poet, burdened with exile and illness, captured the spirit of his generation and now inspires young readers. By presenting Shi Zhi’s poems in chronological order, Winter Sun allows readers to appreciate the evolution of his poetry from his earliest work to his most recent poems. Masterfully translated by Jonathan Stalling, and with an introduction by leading poetry critic Zhang Qinqua, this landmark collection ensures that Shi Zhi’s poetry—so important to Chinese readers during the most challenging of times—will engage the hearts and minds of new readers the world over for years to come.

The lyrical world of Chinese poetry in faithful translations by Kenneth Rexroth.