If you have never read the works of Li-Young Lee, you are missing out on one of the world's most sensitive and emotional poets. Lee's The City in Which I Love You is frighteningly personal, going to the heart of his relationships with his father, his wife and his son.
Lee writes about his wife tenderly, and with so much love you feel as if you are eavesdropping on a private conversation, as with these lines from "This Room and Everything in It":
I'll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.
Your scent,
that scent
of spice and a wound,
I'll let stand for mystery.
Lee's poems about fatherhood introduce you to the sense of wonder and fear he has for his child. For example, in "A Story":
Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.
His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.
In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.
Lee's own relationship with his father is also beautifully explored in his poems, and references to his father are scattered throughout this collection. "Here I Am" is a powerful poem in which Lee gives voice to the emotions felt after his father died:
And though I stopped waiting years ago,
I continue to wait.
Even now
he comes, whom death has made giant.
And small as the rain
and as many.
Whose Sabbath shoes
I blackened each Saturday
and buffed to hard armor.
Lee's poetry is rewarding not only for its spare beauty, but also for its attention to emotion without triteness or cliché. If you are looking for an alternative to the love poems of Pablo Neruda, look no further: Lee's verses to his wife in this collection are equally powerful and romantic, and deserve as much attention.
