Writes Jenny Barwick:

Here are Three New Yueh-fu, by Po Chu-i, one of the most famous poets (772-846) of the T’ang Dynasty, and they appear in a new book translated by David Hinton, Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology. The first poem deals with an elderly man and the price he chose to pay to live for peace instead of war, the second, with the weight of the balance between what an individual needs to keep warm and what is required for collective luxury, and the third, with an old charcoal-seller who had the bad luck to encounter an envoy from the Emperor when on the way to market with his charcoal.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.