"The sijo, a native poetic form of Korean literature, is one of the earliest types of Korean poetry and still popular today. The poems in this hook have been selected from among the hundreds that are familiar and loved by the Korean people.
These are poems from another time and place. Through them, we are invited to walk unknown landscapes, to experience joy and sorrow with people who believed they lived in a Golden Age. We, who have never leaned on a jade rail watching a monk disappear into the mist while temple bells echo in the distance, suddenly find ourselves travelers in an exotic world. It is a world of crystal-beaded blinds and pineknot torches, of laughing flowers and cuckoos singing deep in the wood, of sunset-colored harbors and distant destinations. The sudden insights into the beauty and pain of life are here, too, in a land halfway around the planet, on days that dawned hundreds of years ago.
As with the poetry of other Asian cultures, the theme of mutability pervades all things. The ingredients of each new day are always passing, and so we can learn to accept the moment, the falling blossoms, the coming and going of the seasons, and face the inevitability of growing old-along with the trees and the moon and the sun. When the brushwood gate is pulled shut and the poems are left behind, their whispers have a way of staying on.
- VIRGINIA OLSEN BARON is the editor of _The Seasons of Time_, a collection of Japanese tanka poetry, and _Here I Am_, an anthology of poetry written by young people of America's minority groups.
- MINJA PARK KIM was born in Korea and educated at Seoul National University, from which she graduated with honors in the field of fine arts. She is a gifted painter and textile designer, as well as the illustrator of two previous children's books. Ms. Kim lives with her husband and two daughters in Sunnyside, New York."