Lullabies for a Restless Adult
Li-Young Lee’s new book reveals mysteries
By Roy Kamada
Special to AsianWeek
In his first collection of poetry in 11 years and in his first book in seven years, Book of My Nights (Boa Editions), Li-Young Lee continues to ruminate on and occasionally obsess over the same magisterial themes, which have occupied him over the course of his career. In all of his books, he persistently returns to an almost spiritual consideration of memory, death, love and family.
In Book of My Nights, Lee dwells on questions about the nature of death and love; he marvels at the physical world with a beatific melancholy. As he has done time and time again, Lee returns to poetry’s meeting ground between world and spirit. He mines the seam between the metaphysical and the mundane; he reveals a meditative mind bent upon revelation. In his deceptively simple language, he takes up the mantle of poets such as Emily Dickinson, Ranier Maria Rilke and Theodore Roethke, and seeks, even as they did, the very heart of mystery.
Lee’s personal history is not as tightly focused in this collection as it has been in his previous work, yet his history and family are ever present even as they begin to fade into the realm of myth. Lee’s father, Lee Kuo Yuan, was the onetime personal physician to Mao Tse-Tung and was jailed by Sukarno in Indonesia as a political prisoner. In his memoir, The Winged Seed, Lee recounts the family’s thrilling escape from Indonesia and his father’s own intense religiosity. After time in Hong Kong and Japan, the family finally settled in the United States, where Lee’s father spent the remainder of his life ministering and preaching the Christian faith.
While the stories of this past are not entirely effaced in Lee’s new book, neither are they highlighted. Instead Lee’s approach to the past renders this past into an almost archetypal landscape. In the poem, “My Father’s House,” Lee’s father, walking “through his church at night and [setting] all the clocks for spring,” seems more like a mythic figure. Indeed, the poem occurs during the interval between the moments when “[s]omeone has died. Someone is not yet born.” The tone of the whole collection lends itself more easily to legend than personal memoir. And this is precisely the strength of Lee’s work.
As the title of the collection indicates, and as Lee himself stated in a recent interview, he envisions this new collection of poems as a kind of book of lullabies. But far from any children’s lullaby, the poems in this book are the lullabies for a restless adult struggling with his endless attempts to resolve his own spiritual and psychic crisis. For even as the lullaby reassures the child of sleep’s safety, Lee’s poems reassure us of the world’s ability to console. Weaving in and out of the surreal, he counsels his readers that the unknown might be safe, that night’s “captive fragrance / [is] rid at last of its burial cloths.” For Lee, the world in which we live and so anxiously fear has the chance of being “an unfinished wing of heaven.”
Lee’s style is self-consciously lacking in the overwrought ironies that are so much in vogue in current poetry. He writes with an unexpected, welcome earnestness that disarms our postmodern expectations and revives an easy sense of joy and wonder, which manages, despite itself, to retain the seriousness and foreboding of the darkest of nights. Li-Young Lee delivers poems which do not offer any easy redemption in these troubled times, and yet they manage to console, to uplift in the most serious of ways. This is a new book from one of our most essential poets and is not to be missed.
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