Even in translation Bei Dao's poetry has a dark and quiet strength to it. The poems have a life about them, so that you could read them once and get one thing out of it and then read it again and get another. His style, even when dealing with politics, doesn't try to force its point. Rather, it slowly sinks in-- in a matter-of-fact way. When I read a book of poetry I tend to dog-ear the pages of poems that strike me in a special way. By the time I was done with this one almost the entire book was marked. The style of poetry is especially clean, yet has the flare of spontaneity. Bei Dao's poems are especially interesting to me as a poet, because the language of Chinese poetry exiled out of China tends to be one of his primary concerns. This is a book highly worth reading-- and reading again.