Praised for its its embodiment of authentic realism through the employment of familiar rhythms and an exceptional lyricism rooted in the lives of everyday folk, Shin Kyeong-nim's oeuvre of poetry has undergone several stages of transformation since Farmers' Dance yet remained unchanged in its devotion to the economy of language and its journey in search of the essential spirit of life and poetry. Despite playing important roles in numerous organizations as part of his steady participation in the free media and democratization movements that arose among literary circles in opposition to the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s, he did not grow inclined toward sloganized poems, and his unyielding refusal to tolerate injustice and inhumanity held steady even among the collapse of real socialism and the all-out offensive of capital that characterized the social conditions of the 90s. Following his fascination with the melodies of folk songs in the late 70s and the success of his collections The Pass and Let's Cross Over the Moon in the mid-80s, his long poem The South Han River served as a paragon of epic poetry, while The Path broke new ground in the genre of travel poetry. From the mid-90s onward he expanded his poetic oeuvre, handling topics such as human interiority and death in collections such as The Silhouette of Mother and Grandmother and Horns. His boastless simplicity and authenticity born of lived experience draw attention even today to the movements of this active-duty veteran who continues to direct his steps toward a world where nature and humanity commingle. In his volume 1 commentary Yom Mu-ung casts light upon the significance of Shin Kyeong-nim's literary contributions to the history of modern Korean poetry, asserting that Shin Kyeong-nim's poetry achieved early on the "poetic realization of the voice of the people," and that this early achievement is in fact a "restoration of the poetic tradition destroyed by the severe historical hardships stretching from the rages of Japanese militarism in the late 1930s to liberation and division, the Korean War and anti-communist dictatorship." In the commentary of volume 2, critic Lee Byeong-hoon also praised the "aesthetics of the natural" in Shin Kyeong-nim's poetry as both an expression of the "living form" of a true artist and the greatest talent of all, emphasizing that the "journey to the interior" of his later work is not simply "a regression to one's inner world but an incredible effort to take the small and trifling things of the world into oneself and meditate upon the world in a deeper and more fundamental sense." The confession (volume 1, The Poet's Statement) that though there were several parts he was tempted to revise on a second pass, he left them untouched in recognition of the futility of a struggle seeming to seek to remedy one's past but for a single word with a possible misreading, provides valuable insight into Shin Kyeong-nim's conceptualization of the poet's attitude toward their work. This latest collection presents us with the joy of slowly retreading the paths of poetry and life taken by this artist who has stayed by our sides and spoken for our lives in our stead these past fifty years.