The Vertical Harp: selected poems of Li He

Medieval Chinese poet Li He lived in the last brief flowering of the T’ang dynasty from 790-816, his evocations of the heavenly and the netherworlds are unique, possibly in the whole of the Chinese canon, and are the source of his honorific title, ‘the demon talented one’. Working from this fertile source, Mike Johnson has produced a collection of poems that preserves the extravagant imagery of the originals, while allowing them to be read unfettered in contemporary English.