Like the Bard of Avon, Du Fu's writing is layered and shows immense range

Like the Bard of Avon, Du Fu's writing is layered and shows immense range. The elusive poet wrote in a wide variety of styles and registers. Inside the green-bound volumes are acclaimed verses such as “Moonlit Night” and “View in Spring,” but Owen argues that Du Fu “is a lot more fun when you get out of the well-known ones.”

“He's a quirky poet. When he moves to Chengdu with his family, he has to set up house and writes a poem to people asking for fruit trees and crockery. No one had ever done this kind of poem. He has a poem praising his bondservant Xinxing for repairing a water-piping system in his house. It's a wonderful poem about the joy and discoveries of living in the real world instead of living in the rarefied poetic world,” Owen said

then as soon as they reach forty they work military settlements in the

coming home, their hair is white, and then back to garrison the frontier

a thousand villages and ten thousand hamlets grow over with thorns

the grain grows on the field boundary slopes and one can't tell east from

The new ghosts are tormented by their wrongs, the former ghosts just