Green Tara simultaneously celebrate the human spirit and the natural world, just as they critique our impact on the very landscapes within which we dwell. These poems are like mountain passes, navigable routes through the mountain range of different languages, cultures, classes, and ecological experiences. Our planet's most magnificent mountain ranges have long presented humans with forbidding barriers to travel, trade, and communication, and as such have become deeply lodged into our species psyche. While summiting peaks may provide fleeting moments of nearly omniscient perspective, poetry can serve as lasting passes through whichwe may cross for generations to come. In poems that harkens back to the observations in classical Chinese poetry, Ying focuses on small and often unobserved aspects of the natural world. His words paint delicate pictures of a world, and a psyche, that remained intact-though not untouched-through turmoil and chaos. "