Behind My Eyes: Poems (with audio CD)

published	January 21st 2008 by W. W. Norton
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0393065421 (isbn13: 9780393065428)
pages	144
description	A highly anticipated collection (including an audio CD) from one of the most powerful voices at work in America today. Combining sensi...more [close] A highly anticipated collection (including an audio CD) from one of the most powerful voices at work in America today. Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the United States's most beloved poets. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love. Hardcover with audio CD. [close]
date added	05-16-07 edit book

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Rick rated it:

04/27/08

bookshelves: drama-and-poetry

Read in April, 2008

This is Lee’s fourth collection of poems and I think his best, though I have the discoverer’s fondness for his first collection, Rose. It was on a shelf in a narrow bookcase in the reception area of the Chinatown History Project that I first saw Lee’s work, pulling a copy of Rose while I waited for an appointment. Just killing time but was so captivated that I bought the book after reading just a handful of poems. Lee investigates language and meaning, turning words this way and that until...more This is Lee’s fourth collection of poems and I think his best, though I have the discoverer’s fondness for his first collection, Rose. It was on a shelf in a narrow bookcase in the reception area of the Chinatown History Project that I first saw Lee’s work, pulling a copy of Rose while I waited for an appointment. Just killing time but was so captivated that I bought the book after reading just a handful of poems. Lee investigates language and meaning, turning words this way and that until they tell him something memorable, something not so secret and or so mysterious as it first appeared. He does the same with memory and history, family and spirituality. He juxtaposes personal and political, living and dead, certainty and wonder. A boy climbs a tree to a dangerous height, observes his family through the windows of his house. “And where is his father? / In the room with the shut curtains, of course. / He’s talking to God again, who plays / hide and seek among His names.” Later he asks, “isn’t the boy God’s prey?” And for once, Lee, who asks a lot of questions in his poems, a rhetoric of wonder, answers: “And who wakes now but God in the boy’s flesh / and astonished bright blood, // at his hands suddenly see, / his feet begin to find / his weight alive, / his mind aligned / now with the fate of a stunned will // but some greener knowing and / feeling his way back to earth. // God’s destiny is safe / for now inside the child.” It’s a lovely transition from a boy’s dilemma to a poet’s revelation. The collection is full of such magical transitions. From “First World”: “Sister we died in childhood, remember? / Into birds we died, into their flying. // Toward all of sky we perished so completely / our mother cried, ‘Where are my little ones?’” It’s not a literal or even imagined dying but a disappearance into playful imagination, as children do. Lee’s remembers this now he is past the age of play with his sister, now that he is middle-aged and a parent himself, though this is no stated part of this poem that ends: “We died, and we go on dying. / So where would I look for us except / in everything I see.” Another poem begins, “And so we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I / make the bed.” It describes the carefully folding. The act doesn’t nullify the beginning sentence. The poem’s middle admits, “One day we’ll lie down and not get up. / One day, all we guard will be surrendered. // Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize / what we love, and what it takes / to tend what isn’t for our having.” So maybe juxtaposition isn’t what’s happening here but an integrating of opposites, a reconciling of the paradoxical reality of what we know and what we believe. In the exquisite “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees,” Lee writes “It doesn’t matter. What matters is this: / The kingdom of heaven is good. / But heaven on earth is better. // Thinking is good / But living is better. // Alone in your favorite chair / with a book you enjoy / is fine. But spooning / is even better.” Not a facile destination for a poem that began with images of his father being dragged away from his family by the army, a dictator’s prisoner and not for the first time, but a miraculous one. Sometimes I wish there was a question or two less, that he didn’t name things as if every noun translated to magically descriptive phrases, but mostly I marvel at his command of the trains of his life: the personal, the familial, the political, the spiritual, and how he makes them available to the reader. ...less

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