May, Wong: In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for Our Century

The Song Cave, paperback Publication Date: October 3rd, 2022 Publisher Marketing: 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner Wong May's Landmark Anthology of Tang Dynasty Poetry Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles and refugees. In this anthology we meet Du Fu, Li Bai, Wang Wei, and others less familiar to readers in English. Known as the Golden Age of Poetry, the Tang Dynasty was a time when poems were bartered in the marketplace for wine and tea; and posted in temples and taverns, the words of poets unmissable as street art and signage. Monks, courtiers, courtesans, woodsmen, and farmhands were fluent in poetry. More than reading matter, it was a common currency—whether as a necessity or luxury in times of rampant warfare, droughts, famine, plague, man-made and natural disasters. "Chinese history can be read in the words of the poets. It was left for poetry to teach the least & the most," says the translator Wong M