front-matter to two books drawn from that corpus (eye-blink and ‘North Hills ’) and the interested reader is directed thence. In short, my contention is that the syntactic practice of some Chinese writing is of considerable poetic interest. Chinese characters are in themselves immutable; such modification as they receive is achieved by the addition of other words /characters acting as articles or personal pronouns; these are often dispensed with in poetry. This omission opens up an indeterminate space for the reader to enter and play. Such poems, common in the T’ang dynasty in particular, avoid restricting action to a specific agent (or even gendering that agent) and also refrain from committing such action to one specific time. Obviously it is impossible to replicate such effects, which rely on specificities of literary Chinese, in English; so the north hills poems set out to do just that. For this reason all the poems gathered here are given in more than one version, in a direct attempt to show the implicit variety held in their originals. They loop round alphabetically to start and end with versions of a poem often said to be the most impermeably difficult in all Chinese literature … The first Li Shang-yin text was made as a unique poem-card for an improvised performance of Chris Goode & Jonny Liron’s World of Work (Sussex Poetry Festival, Brighton, 2010), with each Chinese character represented by a single English word; it was reprinted online at Infinite Editions (www.infiniteeditions.blogspot.co.uk ); second version * . Li’s original refers en passant to the famous philosopher dreaming he is a butterfly, or vice versa, paradox. The second Po Chü-I version was published in eye-blink (London: Veer Books, 2010); the first version * . ‘Flamingo feathers’  is a form of the decorative plant Celosia argentea. The second version is dedicated to the poet Jeff Hilson, author of A grasses primer (London: Form Books, 2000); ‘timothy’ is an actual grass (Phleum pratense). The twin versions of  Tai Shu-lun were made for an anthology celebrating the joint sixtieth birthdays of the poets Alan Halsey and Gavin Selerie, Salamanders & Mandrake: Gavin Selerie & Alan Halsey at Sixty (Wakefield: ISPress, 2009). There are borrowings from their work. The first T’ao Ch’ien version appeared in veer off magazine (2008), and is dedicated to Sean Bonney; second version * . Galtymore is an Irish mountain; Simon Cutts’s reworking of a line of Mallarmé is here reworked, after a photo he took in his seventieth birthday year; the poem is for him. The Chinese original of  Ts’ui Hao’s poem alludes to the anonymous ‘Summoning the Recluse’ (from the second-century ad anthology Ch’u Tz’u [‘Songs of the South’]); I’ve used a line from Wordsworth’s ‘The Recluse’ in its stead (in the first version only). The second version nods amicably to Bill Griffiths’s  ‘Version of Ts’ui Hao’s Poem of the

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