The publisher's description is accurate enough but I must add that if one is looking for a book to help one understand Tang poetry, this is one of the best sources available. Schafer takes the veiled, archaic text of the genre and explains the references, illusions, and images used, de-mystifying them. An example: "Indigo-dense woods" should be understood as "The mountain slopes are covered with gloomy woods" (pp. 94-95), "By great Kiang's flopping surges: a deity with trails of mist" = "The river churns wildly through the gorge; near it, also a wild vision, is a spirit trailing evanescent mists like a gown." This is heady staff and a translator is definitely needed. Who better than the master of knowledge of the Tang but Professor Schafer? A few introductory chapters into the work where Schafer has explained all this river/mist/dew/tears/clouds/lost love imagery, and you're on your way to understanding all those Tang poems you read as a student, when you missed 90% of the imagery and probably 99% of the meaning.

This is also a go-to volume if you're looking for examples of classical Chinese paintings to illustrate both Tang poetry as well as the above-mentioned water/sexual/gender imagery. Read this while sitting with a laptop or tablet so you can look up all the wonderful visual references mentioned. For this reason, it's a very, very slow read. The annoying use of Wade-Giles made it even slower reading.

However, as Schafer himself notes, there are "endless reiterations of rain-soaked mountainsides, swirling mists, blinding cloudbanks, howling gibbons, and shrieking winds" so you may feel, as I did, the occasional need to skim sections until something catches your eye again. I for one would have appreciated more background on the female shamans who lost ground around the Han to these slimmer waisted ethereal 'rainbow maidens'. Diligent readers, however, will find many interesting nuggets of life during the Tang, for example this one regarding tea during the Tang: "Li Hsien-yng, in an elaborate fantasy based on the gift of a package of tea from a friendly monk, imagined that he saw the greenish hair of the Hsiang Fairy swirling in his bowl as he mixed the powdered tea leaves" (p. 125).

In the conclusion, Schafer states his authorial intention: "to disclose something of the entanglement of myth, religion, symbolism, and romantic imagination in a segment of T'ang literature. It is evident that even the subtlest poem or the smoothest tale confuses myth with history, legend with fact, pious hope with rational belief." Indeed. ( )