Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito intercepts the traditional loveliness of the pastoral lyric with the close inspection of city eyes. This remarkable book traces the evolution of a poet who is simultaneously contemplative and social, a world-wanderer firmly rooted in his native Beijing. After the quashing of the student movement in 1989 and several years of self-imposed silence, Xi Chuan resumed writing at a point between two ends—between poetry and history, between poetry and philosophy, poetry and religion. He writes with a calm, ever-curious, and questioning intellect—a poet supremely interested in “now” and firmly resistant to either nostalgia for, or amnesia of, “then.” This welcome, bilingual selection by one of China’s preeminent contemporary poets opens more long-sealed doors to the complexity of his homeland.

—C. D. Wright