The Asian Literature Program of the Asia Society, New York, sponsored this volume, the fruit of fifteen years' preparation and testing at public readings. The attractive illustrations are taken from the Maurice Durand Collection Imageries populaires at Yale. The introduction, "Vietnamese Poetry and the Three-Language Tradition," presents a people who like to think of themselves as having always been poets. About half the translations, in free verse, are by Nguyen Ngoc Bich himself; the others are collaborations with either Merwin or Raffel, the latter of course already known for similar work from other Asian languages. Rapidly moving through a millenium, the anthology illustrates the Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese and indigenous folk traditions. Occasional notes interspersed through the text place each poem in its historical and linguistic perspective. Readers who agonized over America's involvement in Vietnam will find food for thought in these lines sparked by the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion: "The land remains unavenged, my hair's already white. / How often have I whetted my sword under the moon?" -- Review by Richard E. Wood; reviewed work: A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry by Nguyen Ngoc Bich; Burton Raffel; W. S. Merwin; Books Abroad, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 859-860,