Pity the Dragon: Poems on Chinese Themes

Chinese emperors, empresses and concubines play a role in the 78 poems in this new collection, but so do delicate porcelains, three-legged frogs, the play of the seasons across China's landscape, and the story of how an American poet became deeply immersed in Chinese culture through an important friendship in his Greenwich Village days. Brett Rutherford's poem cycle, "Emperor Li Yu, A Life in Poems" takes the reader inside the court of Southern Tang with its military and sexual intrigues, where "the bed just wide enough for one, is also wide enough for two." The 39 surviving poems of Li Yu are adapted and expanded here to form a poetic biography of a complex but doomed ruler, forced to drink poison by the rival Song Emperor. Some of Li Yu's exile poems are regarded as the saddest poems in all Chinese literature, and his saga has been re-enacted in no fewer than three Chinese TV dramatic series.

A fantasy poem, "Bai Hu, The White Tiger," is a Shelleyan autumnal narrative, defying age and fear. "The Loft on Fourteenth Street," an elegy but also tribute for the poet's first Chinese friend, uses long-breathed lines to sustain an atmosphere of longing and loss.

"Emperor Kangxi Drinks Tea from Eggshell Porcelain Teacups" is a cycle of twelve miniature poems, inspired by the delicate hand-painted teacups created for the Kangxi Emperor, each cup showing the flowers and trees associated with a lunar month. It is a brief tour of Chinese flower lore, and the Emperor himself, drifting into his gardens on sleepless nights, becomes a character in the poems.

"The Thirteen Scorpions," a monologue, presents a narcissist emperor, the powerful and long-lived Xian Long, who considers himself "the most interesting man who has ever lived," as he delivers a Daoist-magic comeuppance to a Jesuit missionary.

Pity the Dragon is an entryway into the fascinating world of Chinese history and culture, but it is also a tour de force of neo-Romantic poetry: clear, accessible, unsparing of emotion and sorrow but ready to leap with joy at nature's beauty.

Illustrated with examples from classic Chinese painting, and photographs. This is the 309th publication of The Poet's Press.