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Francois Cheng is a French-based academician and Sinologist. He was born in Jiangxi in 1929, and travelled to France in 1948 on a study grant at the age of nineteen. He has translated French poets into Chinese across his lifetime -- but one of his earliest publications was on the features of Chinese classical poetic writing.

Cheng was influenced by Barthes and the field of semiotics. His book looks closely at metaphor, metonymy, and syntax structures of Tang poetry and ancient poetry including the Shi Jing/Chu Ci texts. He proposes that Chinese poetry is influenced by philosophical structures of meaning -- the duality between empty (Void) and full language, the duality of Yin-Yang, and the trinity of Heaven, Earth and Man.

While I found the book interesting in its identification of certain poetic techniques and the leashing of images to speak on implied themes, the writing is deeply academic. Further to that, the translations provided in this book are overtly literal. While this allows for rigorous literary analysis, the translations are clunky. Reading the translation notes by Jerome Seaton, it appears the English version hews as close as possible to Cheng's French. Unless you are interested in semiotics or Chinese classical poetry and are willing to dig through the awkward language, it may be better to pass on this book.