Reading Du Fu: Nine Views.

• Author: Miao, Xiaojing

Reading Du Fu: Nine Views. Edited by XIAOFEI TIAN. Hong Kong: HONG KONG UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020. Pp. viii+ 181. $45.

This edited volume--its title likely a deliberate reference to the twelfth-century collection The Collected Commentaries on Du Fu s Poetry from Nine Scholars (Jiu jia jizhu Du shi [phrase omitted])--collects nine contemporary scholars' critiques of works by the great Tang poet Du Fu [phrase omitted] (712-770). Known as the "poet sage" and "poet historian," Du Fu is one of the best studied poets in Chinese, though not all of the scholarly attention is on his poetry. By contrast, the number of English academic books and articles on Du Fu is far from adequate. Xiaofei Tian rightly attributes this lack of attention to "a cultural-historical and materialist turn" and "a trend of canon revision" (p. 2) in the field of Chinese literary studies, as well as to Du Fu's own canonical status, with neither his worshippers nor ridiculers spending the time to read his 1,400 poems. Accordingly, this edited volume, with its commitment to reading Du Fu's poetry "attentively" and "anew" (p. 3), is an important and exciting project.

Reading Du Fu is divided into three sections, each addressing one crucial topic related to Du Fu's poetry. The first section explores Du Fu's reflections on home, locale, and empire in poems composed when he was "drifting along in the southwest between Heaven and Earth" [phrase omitted], to quote his "Singing My Feelings on Ancient Traces No 1" ("Yonghuai guji qi yi".[phrase omitted]). Two places in southwest China were of extreme significance to our poet: one was Chengdu [phrase omitted] and the other was Kuizhou [phrase omitted]. Arriving in Chengdu near the end of 759, Du Fu started to build his Thatched Cottage (Cao tang [phrase omitted]) in the spring of 760, thus finally having a home after going through long and difficult journeys during turbulent times. Thanks to the relative peace and happiness he now enjoyed, Du Fu's poetry displayed new features: a detached, gracefully gorgeous style matured, and the mentioning of political affairs became much less noticeable. That Du Fu's Chengdu poems no longer center on political affairs is illustrated in Jack Chen's chapter, where he discusses the idea and importance of home in Du Fu's works after the An Lushan Rebellion, especially in four poems composed when the poet was dwelling in the Thatched Cottage. Chen claims that Du Fu's gestures to create a sense of home in his poetry are "attempts to find significance beyond the context of empires and dynastic trauma"; therefore, his longing for home is "at its heart, a wish for the return to the ordinary" (p. 16). Chen's discussion draws attention to an often neglected side of Du Fu, who "forgets his lord" (against the traditional view that he "did not forget his lord even for the interval of a single meal"--[phrase omitted]; as described in Su Shi's [phrase omitted]...