Goh's work builds upon two significant recent studies: Richard B. Mather's The Age of Eternal Brilliance: Three Lyric Poets on the Yung-ming Era (483–493) (Leiden: Brill, 2003), and Xiaofei Tian's Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007). While the former restricts itself mostly to detailed annotated translation of the same three poets with which Goh is concerned (Shen Yue, Xie Tiao, and Wang Rong), the latter explores literary developments of the following century. Goh's book can thus be seen as a significant commentary on Mather's text that also moves many of the issues that concern Tian to a slightly earlier period.

The study divides neatly into two halves: chapters 1 to 3 give an overview of the cultural context of the Yongming poets as well as the ideology underlying the rise of tonal experimentation in literature (“sound”) and the impact of Buddhism upon visual sensitivity in the poems (“sight”). Chapters 4 to 6 then explore in detail how these issues manifest themselves in three kinds of verse: garden poems, travel poems, and landscape poems. The book is unusually short for a Chinese poetry monograph (a little over 120 pages without notes and bibliography), but this is a strength: by focusing on viewing Yongming verse through one particular perspective, Goh succeeds admirably in re-creating the Yongming aesthetic and demonstrating more successfully than any previous work what the poets were attempting to accomplish. Given the different direction that Chinese poetics took from the Tang dynasty onwards, this task is not an easy one and involves a good bit of creative speculation and sensitivity to the vocabulary and argumentation of the writers involved. I suspect that if Goh had attempted a more ambitious overview of Southern Dynasties poetry, much of the sharpness of her observations would have been lost in the details.

Particularly striking are chapters 2 and 3, which lay out the author's breakdown of the term shengse (“sound and sight”)—a concept that in the Confucian tradition often denotes sensual excess, but which was employed as a positive value in the Yongming aesthetic. Chapter 2 goes over some old ground in attempting to clarify the role of tonal awareness in the writings of Shen Yue and his contemporaries, but no previous writer has explained the tonal experiments of the poets with so much clarity (and this chapter should be essential reading in future for history of Chinese literature classes). Chapter 3, which further develops Tian's discussion of the impact of Buddhist theories of visual perception on Southern Dynasties literature, carries the argument to the next stage by emphasizing the Yongming poets' fascination in their yongwu verse with the individual (often small and inconspicuous) object and how they use descriptive language to emphasize the creative and subjective role the individual's perception plays in “creating” reality. As Goh aptly puts it: “poetry (shi), when directed at a thing, makes it present its form. In other words, things do not merely seem real—they become real through their yongwu shi” (p. 47). The discussion here is impressively lucid and distinguished by an exceptional ability to demonstrate abstract concepts with examples from specific poems.

The later thematic chapters as well contain some excellent analyses of individual poems and again show the author's ability to relate theoretical concerns to concrete discussions of the verse. Particularly noteworthy here is her discussion of Xie Tiao's landscape verse, which ably demonstrates how Xie built on the theoretical ideas of Zong Bing and the rhetoric of Xie Lingyun to build a more personal and individualized descriptive language to represent the poet's relationship to nature.

By and large, reading Yongming verse for its aesthetic satisfaction is a difficult enterprise, given that the changes of the sounds of Chinese (which makes a consideration of tonal issues largely an archaeological enterprise) and the disappearance of courtier culture have deprived the poems today of the context that gave them their original vividness and charm. It can seem like attempting to hear a piece of music with nothing but the score in front of us and with no possibility of an actual performance. Yet if we will ever learn to read Yongming verse with appreciation and not merely as historical curiosities, we can thank Goh's study for making it a great deal easier.