The Southern Garden Poetry Society: Literary Culture and Social Memory in Guangdong

On one level, David Honey's new book is about Cantonese poems. The book provides the first comprehensive study of literary images that Cantonese writers commonly employed in composing poems in Classical Chinese about their native place. Honey uses the terms “Southern Muse” and “Cantonese Muse” to encapsulate this set of images, “the voice of the collective verse produced about Guangdong” by Guangdong poets (p. ix). He is to be commended for aiming to convey the content of poetry produced by Cantonese writers rather than attempting to characterize the “spirit” of Cantonese poetry. While chapter 1 is devoted to summarizing themes in Cantonese poetry about Guangdong from Tang times through the seventeenth century, the book as a whole is centered on a specific subset of Cantonese poetic images about Guangdong, those associated with the Southern Garden Poetry Society. A society that was reconstituted or reimagined in various guises into the twentieth...