Presents the poems that combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation and evoke the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow - suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature.

In his enjoyable readings of ambiguity, puns and paradox, Empson draws on a variety of authors from Chaucer to Eliot, illuminating the strategies of individual writers and creating a brilliant general theory of poetic practice: wide ranging, witty and still controversial.

Wu Ch'eng-en wrote Monkey in the middle of the 16th century, adding to an ancient Chinese legend his own touches of delicacy and humour. The result is a jumble of the absurd and the profound, of religion and history, of anti-bureaucratic satire and pure poetry.

Presents a translation of Li Po's poetry (AD 701-762). This book features Li Po's work which is suffused with Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

The heroes of the Spanish novels make their way through a seamy underworld populated by unsavoury beggars, corrupt priests, eccentrics, whores and criminals. Lazarillo de Tormes and Pablos the swindler are determined to attain the trappings of the gentleman, but have little time for the gentlemanly ideals of religion, justice, honour and nobility.