David Hinton

Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China David Hinton New edition

Marc Notes: Originally published: Washington, D. C.: Counterpoint, 2002; A new directions book.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-293) and index. Publisher Marketing: China's tradition of rivers-and-mountains poetry stretches across millennia. This 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 Zen thought, the work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in Hinton's rich and accessible translations. Mountain Home collects poems from 5th through 13th century China and includes the poets Li Po, Po Chu-i and Tu Fu. The rivers-and-mountains tradition covers a remarkable range of topics: comic domestic scenes, social protest, travel, sage recluses, and mountain landscape shaped into forms of enlightenment. And within this range, the poems articulate the experience of living as an organic part of the natural world and its processes. In an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this tradition grows more urgently important every day. Mountain Home offers poems that will charm and inform not just readers of poetry, but also the large community of readers who are interested in environmental awareness. Review Citations: Wilson Public Library Catalog 12/31/2008 pg. 874 (EAN 9780811216241, Paperback) Wilson Public Library Catalog 01/01/2013 pg. 1054 (EAN 9780811216241, Paperback) Contributor Bio:  Hinton, David David Hinton's many translations of classical Chinese poetry and philosophy have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary texts that convey the actual texture and density of the originals. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1997, he received the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in East Calais, Vermont.