So Many Poems

Xu Qichao's *Nuoduo's Poems* is a self-selected collection spanning a notably wide range, its 130 poems arranged in three sections—"Blue Melody," "Ballet of the Wasteland," and "Radiant Hours"—a structure designed to set the tones of different periods against one another. Its value lies not in repeating a single style but in the breadth of its stylistic spectrum: by turns as expansive as a great river flowing east, as graceful as a stream winding through a valley, and as dreamlike as mist-veiled hills or fresh rain on empty mountains. Love, family, friendship, and reflections on life form the backbone, while landscapes and celebrated historic sites fill a substantial portion, revealing the author's untroubled, open-hearted delight in nature. The collection includes both long poems of a hundred lines and short pieces of a dozen or so, all pointing toward "poetic expression and the poetry of expression," offering writers a useful model for line breaks, rhythm, and closure. The landscape and human-scene photographs taken by the author, included in the book, create a visual-textual interplay with the poems, making it well suited to casual reading on a journey or on a quiet evening, without any need to proceed in section order.