Maghiel van Crevel's previous book, Language Shattered, has become a trusted guide to the place of poetry in Chinese literary history of the 1970s and 1980s. Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money does the same for the 1990s and early 2000s and, with the benefit of historical distance, helps us understand the continuities and changes that took place in poetry during the cultural, economic, and political transition between these two periods. The product of a rich and thoughtful engagement with avant-garde poetry written in the PRC over the past three decades, Van Crevel's latest book is more than just an insightful survey: it makes an impassioned and informed case for poetry's on-going vitality and for what it has to teach us about China – and indeed the world – today.

The book comprises 13 chapters, which address in detail the work of 11 avant-garde poets, including well-known figures such as Han Dong, Yang Lian and Bei Dao, and younger, lesser-known poets, such as Yan Jun. Through these “case studies,” Van Crevel surveys and synthesizes a vast range of poetry and literary criticism, in prose that is always clear, cogent, and readable. The book has two major advantages over similar studies published in the PRC: extensive coverage of criticism in Western languages as well as in Chinese; and the ability to address directly sensitive political matters, such as the Tiananmen incident. These advantages, along with Van Crevel's personal contacts, meticulous research, and encyclopaedic command of his material, make this the definitive sourcebook for the study of contemporary Chinese poetry in any language.

Van Crevel does a remarkable job of covering the diversity of the avant-garde poetry scene and of identifying its key tendencies. While the two key features of the book – literary historical survey and case studies – inevitably stand in some tension with one another, this is always a productive tension. As a literary historian, Van Crevel tracks avant-garde poetry's – still contested and incomplete – stylistic and conceptual shift away from “elevated” styles and towards “earthly,” everyday forms. As a close reader of both poetry and the discourses surrounding it, he shows the limits of such literary historical generalizations through the contradictions and complexity of the poetry itself, the poetic theories and debates that frame it, and the personal, group, institutional, cultural, social, historical, political and economic dynamics that shape it.

Van Crevel never allows close reading to be subordinated to the broader literary historical narrative. He is particularly effective in showing the multivalent nature of contemporary Chinese poetry, in which reference and meaning are but elements in an art form including sound (as in his discussion of rhythm in Xi Chuan's “Salute”), wordplay, narrative intricacy (as in the poetry of Sun Wenbo), and multiple media (as in his final chapter, on Yan Jun). This “attention to ‘minute detail’” reflects Van Crevel's resistance to “content bias” – to the reduction of poetry to direct statement and social, historical, and political information. Traditional notions of the poet's role as moral voice and a persistent romantic view of poet-hood, along with the politically charged approach to culture in 20th-century China, mean literary texts are often read as reflections of their authors' lives or as social and political commentary. Van Crevel illustrates this point through his documentation of the obsessive attention given to the lives, rather than the poetry, of writers who committed suicide between 1989 and the early 1990s (his main example is Haizi). Of course, content bias is by no means limited to 20th and 21st-century China, as Zhang Longxi has shown in his study of allegorical readings East and West, or as Jonathan Culler has illustrated in his recent discussion of the dominance of hermeneutics over structuralism in 20th-century Anglo-American literary criticism. For historical and institutional reasons, however, China studies in the West have been especially prone to this bias, reducing complex cultural forms to simplified political and social statements.

Instead, Van Crevel's book reveals poetry's enmeshment in the cultural, social and political complexity of China today, including technological change, the rise of the internet, and urban youth culture (as in “lower body” poetry); the tension between national language policy and regional dialects (as in Yu Jian's poetics); the relationships between Beijing and provincial centers, between North and South, and between China and the West; anxiety over commercialization; and the resurgence of Chinese nationalism. Many of these concerns are on display in the debate between “intellectual” and “popular” poetry – the book's most extensive case study. Here too Van Crevel's attention to detail – not just in poetry but in social and political dynamics – pays off: he reveals the internal contradictions and complications in the positions adopted by the both sides in the debate, as for example when those opposed to foreign influence cite foreign authors to make their point.

If at times it is hard to know how to put all the pieces together in Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money, that is part of the book's point: complexity and plurality are what makes poetry irreducible to overarching theories. Van Crevel's insistence that poetry transcends its local historical context and his refusal to gloss over complexity – emphasized by his study's massive bibliographical and textual detail – perhaps lead him to underplay this broader point and the import of his book for the study of contemporary China. Only in the book's concluding lines does Van Crevel finally articulate his work's most intriguing claim: our age of digital technologies and globalization – in which China plays an increasingly central role – demands precisely poetry's attention to complex, multivalent and ambiguous cultural forms. Van Crevel's superb study shows us that we cannot easily summarize in prosodic terms what this new world means or what it might become.