Where the World Does Not Follow: Buddhist China in Picture and Poem

Fantastic photos, moving, beautiful poems of ancient Buddhist monks and hermets.

Where the World Does Not Follow combines spectacular photography of China's most remote mountains, with translations of the beautiful and simple poetry of ancient buddhist hermits who once inhabited them. The book opens anywhere to reveal Steven R. Johnson's incredible photographs matched on the facing page, with Mike O'Connor's artfully rendered translations. Each photograph and each poem in this masterful collection is among the very best I have seen, but the greater joy is how - taken together - each pair of photographs and poems creates an object of profound beauty and simplicity. Where the World Does Not Follow is as unique as it is beautiful.

... although I am a little disappointed by the quality of printing of the photographs. Imagine how a print on slightly textured photographic paper would look if photocopied - it would lose some resolution and with that some life and depth. The originals must have been stunning, but no-one to whom I have shown the book has been 'wow'ed.The format is photograph facing poem in translation and script. Photographs and poems are well-matched. At the end of the book there are some brief but interesting notes, and a short bibliography. I thought that the translations were very 'honest' - thoughtful, not flowery. I can believe that they would be close to the poet's intent. I'd have loved to have seen a literal translation as well as the poetic one (say in an appendix) - and a phonetic translation of some sort. But this is more a philosophical and visual tome than a scholarly one, quite different in style and content from, say, Stephen M Johnson's "Fifty Tang Poems".May be the publishers will put readings of the poems on the web for downloading? That would give the book a whole new dimension.