To be clear, this was an excellent and worthwhile project. I would love to know more about female, Chinese poets. I guess now I know a bit more, but it isn't much.

Perhaps the problem is in the selection? Rexroth and Ling seem to have chosen sexy poems, or heart-rending poems, or 'revolutionary' poems, three types of poem that I'm particularly uninterested in. That said, even I can recognize that some of the pieces here are excellent, once put in context. Ts'ai Yen's poems describing life as an exile in Mongolia, the pleasure of returning to China and the pain of having to leave her sons behind moved even my stone heart. Yu Hsuan-Chi's poem about the wish for knowledge and the knowledge of being excluded is very well done:

On a visit to ch'ung chen taoist temple I see in the south hall the list of successful candidates in the imperial examinations

Cloud capped peaks fill the eyes
In the Spring sunshine.
Their names are written in beautiful characters
And posted in order of merit.
How I hate this silk dress
That conceals a poet.
I life my head and read their names
In powerless envy.

And if anyone can find anything else anywhere by or about 'Wu Tsao' (= Wu Zao), let me know.

Is it the translations? They're pretty lifeless, even when they're good; just prose in short lines. Presumably these poets deserve better. Is it cold historical facts? Poetry takes a lot of education, then access to publishing institutions, then promotion, then acceptance by critics, then acceptance by later critics, and so on. Perhaps Chinese poetry just shut women out, and this is really the best available? The revolution doesn't seem to have helped, if the twentieth century writers here are any example.

I'm guessing there are lots of problems with this anthology, and these are just a few of them. In the unlikely event that someone with pull is reading this, how about a better book with the same mission? ( )

reads kind of uneven, owing to a big contrast in coverage between the early poets and the 20th century ones, and there's sadly a dropoff in quality too. but the early poets (most of the book), who go back as far as 300BC and are all given detailed biographies as much as it's possible, are uniformily exquisite, and this is an important volume. ( )

Originally published in 1972 by the Seabury Press as "The Orchid Boat".