On the Book of Jade

This is a fine collection of old poetry. It’s hard to believe the works here are more than 120 years old, and we really know very little about the author. Death, corpses, the macabre, and the Gothic run all through it, with a solid dose of the nineteenth-century idea of the “Orient” — Babylon as a place of mystery, the secrets of Persia, and so on. I really like it; work like this has its aesthetic place, even if that place isn’t serious scholarship or most fiction and poetry.