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 century, the Southern Garden originated as a group of five Cantonese poets who lived during the Yuan-Ming transition: Sun Fen and four others, later collectively referred to as the Former Five Masters of the Southern Garden.

A major contribution of this book is that it introduces to an English-language audience six hundred years of Cantonese poetry, a regional poetic tradition that scholarly literature often neglects in favor of poets based at the political center or in Jiangnan. Honey is almost apologetic for emphasizing the Guangdong-themed poems of the writers whom he studies, rather than other poems that won some of these Cantonese poets empire-wide fame. He states that his book “focuses on the process of legitimizing local literati culture, even though the reverse process of attempting to overcome cultural marginalization on the part of the national center was equally strong historically” (p. xiii). As other scholars have shown, however, in late imperial China promoting local literati culture was precisely the means by which a locale's literati elite overcame marginalization and forged links with the imperial center. This seems especially true for the “long tradition in Guangdong of patriotism to the ruling house” (pp. 30–31), which Honey describes as an important component of the “Cantonese Muse.” One could refine this argument. There was in this remote southern region, if anything, a long tradition of loyalty to alternative regimes (e.g., Southern Yue, Southern Han). Some of the original Five Masters of the Southern Garden, in fact, were Yuan subjects employed by the regional warlord He Zhen and then by the new Ming dynasty. Loud protestations of loyalty in Sun Fen's poems—what Honey neatly refers to as “an almost tedious concern for pointing up Cantonese loyalty to the distant throne” (p. 42)—repackage his shifting loyalties as unswerving loyalty. For Cantonese literati in the middle and late Ming, portraying loyalty as a regional characteristic may have been a means of shedding undesirable ethnic labels (Yao, Dan) and identifying with an ethno-cultural center.

On another level, this book is about poets: Cantonese literati who either identified themselves with, or were identified by others with, the Southern Garden Poetry Society. The author asserts that “the Southern Garden Poetry Society was the only major poetry society in Chinese history which was reconstituted more than once at regular intervals over 500 years” (p. 55). The second half of the book covers various reincarnations of the Southern Garden associated with the so-called Later Five Masters in the mid-sixteenth century and a group of twelve literati in the last decade of the Ming (chapter 5), a circle of educators active between the early nineteenth century and 1911 (chapter 6), and Cantonese poets during the Republican era (chapter 7). Honey recognizes that the poetry society “occasionally functioned as no more than an ideal image to stimulate poetic composition or to represent poetic excellence; it did not always have an actual existence in the real world of South China” (p. xi). Yet the author occasionally succumbs to the temptation of describing the “reconvening” of the society when there is no evidence that it existed as a functioning organization. This is especially the case with the sixteenth-century Later Five Masters (p. 99). A more important issue, one that would appeal to scholars of late imperial Chinese literature and history, is the question of why this particular poetry society had such a long life, whether as an organization or as an image.

One admirable goal of the book is to make this regional poetic tradition accessible to a wider audience, through Honey's translation and analysis of a large number of important poems. Unfortunately, the book is presented in a manner that is unforgiving to general readers, who will not know that a Chinese title cited in the text refers to a dynastic history (p. 5), a Confucian classic (p. 32), or a literary anthology (pp. 7, 73); that men identified by different names are the same person (Li Erqiao/Li Jian, p. 52; Wang Fusheng/Wang Quan, p. 131; Yi Moqing/Yi Bingshou, p. 147); or that the Guangdong tong zhi is the Guangdong provincial gazetteer, not the Guangzhou prefectural gazetteer (pp. 61, 64).