Bright Moon, White Clouds Selected Poems of Li Po

Li Po (701-762) is considered one of the greatest poets to live during the Tang dynasty-what was considered to be the golden age for Chinese poetry. He was also the first Chinese poet to become well known in the West, and he greatly influenced many American poets during the twentieth century. Calling himself the "God of Wine" and known to his patrons as a "fallen immortal," Li Po wrote with eloquence, vividness, and often playfulness, as he extols the joys of nature, wine, and the life of a wandering recluse. Li Po had a strong social conscience, and he struggled against the hard times of his age. He was inspired by the newly blossoming Zen Buddhism and merged it with the Taoism that he had studied all his life. Though Li Po's love of wine is legendary, the translator, J. P. Seaton, includes poems on a wide range of topics-friendship and love, political criticism, poems written to curry patronage, poems of the spirit-to offer a new interpretation of this giant of Chinese poetry. Seaton offers us a poet who learned hard lessons from a life lived hard and offered his readers these lessons as vivid, lively poetry-as relevant today as it was during the Tang dynasty. Over one thousand poems have been attributed to Li Po, many of them unpublished. This new collection includes poems not available in any other editions.

Li Po (701–762) wrote of the pleasures of nature, of wine, and of the life of a wandering poet  in a way that speaks to us across the centuries with remarkable intimacy—and that special, timeless quality is one of the reasons Li Po became the first of the Chinese poets to gain wide appreciation in the West.  His work is one of the glories of Chinese poetry’s golden age, and it has not ceased to delight readers in the twelve centuries since.  His influence is felt in the work of artists as diverse as Ezra Pound and Gustav Mahler. J. P. Seaton’s translations—which include some poems that appear here in English for the first time—bring the poet vividly and playfully to life, and his introductory essay broadens our view of Li Po, both the poet and the man.