The trajectory these poems blaze offers contemporary American poetry a distinctive and refreshing approach to what we used to call the human condition. This is a book concerned with mortality, friendship, and regret. The psyche looking back at its life. As such, The Life of Tu Fu sometimes feels like a poetic biography of my own life, or maybe yours.

The Life of Tu Fu comes without any notes or explanatory appendix. But it is not necessary: Weinberger’s tour de force through Du Fu’s poetry needs no scholarly apparatus to convey its intentions. … His remix of Du Fu’s work transports us beyond the boundaries of individual poems and, as far as that might be possible, into the mind that produced these poems, the whirligig of ideas, echoes, experiences, and stories that, when the mind is ready, pours itself into the shape of a poem and, when that one is finished, does so again and again and yet again—in Du Fu’s case, as we know, over 1,400 times.

Weinberger’s verse achieves not only the linearity of narrative but also a leveling effect—putting a fish on par with the moon…Tu Fu pursued a poetry illuminating at once the nonhierarchical, embodied chaos of the real as well as the interplay of absence and presence that defines the Tao.

Combining scholarly authority with a moral allegiance to the arcane, the translator and editor Weinberger creates genre-bending essays and prose poems to help us see the world anew.

His essays use lists, collages of information, and sometimes, as poetry does, varying line breaks. They don’t read like anyone else’s work.

My favorite essayist is Eliot Weinberger. His remarkable breadth of calm concern is impressive.