Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow: Poems from Sung Dynasty China by Yang Wan-Li (Companions for the Journey)

This is a delightful, heartfelt volume of poetry from a Chinese minister who is a zen meditator. The images and insights are immediately accessible to the modern reader, and you have the sense of reading modern poetry. But in fact, Wan-li is writing in the 12th cen, two hundred years before Chaucer.Wan-li has an way of observing intimate moments with humor and delicate compassion. "I see a fly/ warming himself on the windowsill,/ rubbing his legs, enjoying the morning sun./ He seems to know when the light will shift:/ a sudden buzz/ and he's at another window."He writes about traveling, especially travel by boat as was the mode at the time, and about melancholy after nearly dying of an illness, about astonishing transformations, about how he hates the oppressive hot weather. He shows you impermanence, suffering and the way of nature---all very discreetly, without being difficult or obvious.He is wonderfully fresh. A great companionable collection of poems. Too bad there aren't more.

Great book, but... The publisher needs to use a larger font. Not everyone has "hawk vision"! There is room on the pages to use something like a 10 point font. What they've used is maybe a 7 or 8 point.This is truly inconsiderate of the average person's eyesight.Again, a great book despite this.

Right on brother

i love it. wonderful calming funny clomping visions of empires random poetically visionary functionary, mule riding, fish flying breathless scrubs of unmutiny, dawn.