The poems and verses of this world are like petals scattered along the river of time. Some are gathered up by writers and scholars, bound into books, and passed down for a thousand years. Others drift away with the current and vanish without a trace. Yet the forgotten pieces are not necessarily inferior to the celebrated works that have survived. Perhaps they appear only in some long out-of-print book of poetry criticism, or exist only in the notes of an unknown scholar. Perhaps they are no more than weathered poems inscribed on the wall of an ancient temple. They had no chance to be recited again and again, nor were they eligible for any anthology. But they, too, carry the joys and sorrows of a person and the heartbeat of an era. This book tries to salvage those forgotten fragments of poetry and weave a possible story around each one, using the touch of prose. These stories are not rigorous works of scholarly research. They are flights of imagination about human emotion, inspired by a few brief lines of verse. Behind every poem stands a person: perhaps a soldier stationed in a frontier town during the Tang dynasty, a songstress on a rainy night in the Song dynasty, a wronged wife secluded in the inner chambers of the Ming dynasty, or a down-and-out scholar on an ancient road during the Qing dynasty.
