"It is one of the very first art books which helped artists develop the aptitude for seeing the inner essence of various natural phenomena."--"Shambhala Sun"

""Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom" could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence of image and text, of history and the present, of evocation and concrete image."--"The Rumpus"

"Red Pine introduces Western readers to both the text itself and the traditions it has inherited."--"Virginia Quarterly Review"

Through a series of brief four-lined poems and illustrations, Sung Po-jen aims at training artistic perception: how to truly "see" a plum blossom. First published in AD 1238, "Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom" is considered the world's earliest-known printed art books. This bilingual edition contains the one hundred woodblock prints from the 1238 edition, calligraphic Chinese poems, and Red Pine's graceful translations and illuminating commentaries.

"Tiger Tracks"

"winter wind bends dry grass
flicks its tail along the ridge
fearful force on the loose
don't try to braid old whiskers"

Red Pine's commentary: "The Chinese liken the north wind that blows down from Siberia in winter to a roaring tiger. China is home to both the Siberian and the South China tigers. While both are on the verge of extinction, the small South China tiger still appears as far north as the Chungnan Mountains, where hermits have shown me their tracks."

Sung Po-jen was a Chinese poet of the thirteenth century.

Red Pine (a.k.a. Bill Porter) is one of the world's foremost translators of Chinese poetry and religious texts. His published translations include "The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain," "Lao-tzu's Taoteching," and "Poems of the Masters." He lives near Seattle, Washington.

Two contemporary poets from Taiwan, Yang Mu (pen name for Wang Ching-hsien, b. 1940) and Lo Ch'ing (pen name for Lo Ch'ing-che, b. 1948), are represented in this bilingual edition of Chinese poetry ranging from the romantic to the postmodern. Both poets were involved in the selection of poems for this volume, the first edition in any language of their selected work. Their backgrounds, literary styles, and professional lifes are profiled and compared by translator Joseph R. Allen in critical essays that show how Yang and Lo represent basic directions in modern Chinese poetics and how they have contributed to the definition of modernism and postmodernism in China. The book's organization reflects each poet's method of composition. Yang's poems are chronologically arrangd, as his poetry tends to describe a narrative line that closely parallels his own biography. Lo's poems, which explore a world of concept and metaphor, are grouped by theme. Although each poet has a range of poetic voices, Yang's work can be considered the peak of high modernism in Chinese poetry, while Lo's more problematic work suggests the direction of new explorations in the art. In this way the two poets are mutually illuminating. Each group of poems is prefaced by an "illustration" that draws from another side of the poet's intellectual life. For Yang, who is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington, these are excerpts from his academic work (written under the name C.H. Wang) in English. The poems by Lo, a well-known painter living in Taiwan, are illustrated by five of his own ink paintings.