David Hinton is an excellent translator of classical Chinese poetry. I had hoped that this book would say more about the connection between landscape and that tradition. There are glimpses of that here, especially in how he links Chinese pictograms to the meanings they visualize, but for the most part there's too much of the irritating clichés of the Shambhala house style: short nouns lacking articles to create a poetic effect, strings of nature images that give no sense of place, a retreat into generalizations, repetition, and dichotomies. There's a better book in here that seems close to bursting out. A discussion of Tu Fu's "Moonrise" gives an excellent demonstration of how the poem's description of the rising moon on a cold night is all about the concepts of friendship and linked minds. I only wish there had been more of that. ( )