Mountain Home

"China's tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" poetry stretches across millennia, representing the earliest and most extensive literary engagement with wilderness in human history. It is a plain-spoken poetry of immediate day-to-day experience, and yet seems most akin to China's grand landscape paintings. Although its wisdom is ancient, rooted in Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) thought, this work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in David Hinton's wonderful and accessible translations." "The rivers-and-mountains tradition embraces a remarkable range of topics: comic domestic…