THE MIDNIGHT FLUTE: Chinese Poems of Love...

THE MIDNIGHT FLUTE: Chinese Poems of Love and Longing, translated from the Chinese by Sam Hamill (Shambala: $11; 150 pp., illustrated, paperback original). Because the Imperial government forbade scholar-officials to serve in their native provinces, parting and separation became important motifs in Chinese poetry. This mini-anthology of Hamill’s satisfying translations offers Western readers an overview of more than 1,000 years of verse. The poems tend to be allusive, formal and reserved in tone: Contemplating his own mortality, Li Po (701-762), wrote, “We sit together, the mountain and me,/ until only the mountain remains.”