Book of my nights Poems

Passionate and profound, Lee's long-awaited third collection charts the mid-life ontological crisis of a speaker who "can't tell what my father said about the sea... from the sea itself," and finds himself unmoored without that strong male voice. Lee's father was a personal physician to Mao Zedong, who took the family to Jakarta (where Lee was born) in the '50s. As Indonesia began persecuting Chinese citizens and his father was imprisoned, Lee's family left the country, spent five years moving from place to place in Asia, and arrived in the U.S. in 1964. (These events are described in The Winged Seed, Lee's American Book Award-winning memoir of 1995.) Lee has ever been concerned with questions of origins, but in the 11 years since the publication of his last collection, memories of childhood answers furnished by father, mother and siblings now fail to assuage the poet's 3 a.m. doubts. Yet he does not trust himself to formulate answers on his own in these 35 nocturnes, and the father seems to be missing or dead. The poet's tightly wrought, extraordinarily careful and finally heart-wrenching responses finally boil down to one ultimate cry: "Where is his father? Who is his mother?" The complex permutations of these fundamental inquiries and their unsatisfactory answers construct a space in which knowledge and redemption, if never quite attained, always seem possible. Lee is never faced with sheer emptiness; his "silence thunders," a vocal presence to which Lee's speaker responds, "declaring a new circumference/ even the stars enlarge by crowding down to hear." (Sept. 15) Forecast: A favorite on course syllabi, Lee should sell strongly and steadily with this long-awaited new collection. The Winged Seed, first published by S&S, is available in paperback from Ruminator Books, the Minnesota house (and review) formerly called Hungry Mind. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

"A wilderness of `who' and `why'" a line from one of the poems in this slim volume by Indonesian-born poet Lee (Winged Seed), who won the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets in 1990 well describes the work as a whole. "What is the world?" "Who am I?" These questions and others are at the core of each poem. "Does anyone want to know the way to Spring?" he asks. Lee's poems are riddled with puzzles reminiscent of Zen koans. Meditative, ungrounded, and vaporous, they are almost metaphysical and require the reader to proceed slowly. Strong images of the poet's mother and of a dead brother abound. Lee's work is also concerned with the transition from one continent and culture to another he and his family fled to the United States when Lee was a small child after his father spent a year as a political prisoner of President Sukarno. These poems can be a challenge, but they will reward the persistent reader. Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Chapter One Pillow There's nothing I can't find under there. Voices in the trees, the missing pages of the sea. Everything but sleep. And night is a river bridging the speaking and the listening banks, a fortress, undefended and inviolate. There's nothing that won't fit under it: fountains clogged with mud and leaves, the houses of my childhood. And night begins when my mother's fingers let go of the thread they've been tying and untying to touch toward our fraying story's hem. Night is the shadow of my father's hands setting the clock for resurrection. Or is it the clock unraveled, the numbers flown? There's nothing that hasn't found home there: discarded wings, lost shoes, a broken alphabet. Everything but sleep. And night begins with the first beheading of the jasmine, its captive fragrance rid at last of burial clothes. A Table in the Wilderness I draw a window and a man sitting inside it. I draw a bird in flight above the lintel. That's my picture of thinking . If I put a woman there instead of the man, it's a picture of speaking . If I draw a second bird in the woman's lap, it's ministering . A third flying below her feet. Now it's singing . Or erase the birds, make ivy branching around the woman's ankles, clinging to her knees, and it becomes remembering . You'll have to find your own pictures, whoever you are, whatever your need. As for me, many small hands issuing from a waterfall means silence mothered me. The hours hung like fruit in night's tree means when I close my eyes and look inside me, a thousand open eyes span the moment of my waking. Meanwhile, the clock adding a grain to a grain and not getting bigger, subtracting a day from a day and never having less, means the honey lies awake all night inside the honeycomb wondering who its parents are. And even my death isn't my death unless it's the unfathomed brow of a nameless face. Even my name isn't my name except the bees assemble a table to grant a stranger light and moment in a wilderness of Who? Where? (Continues...) Excerpted from Book of My Nights by Li-Young Lee. Copyright © 2001 by Li-Young Lee. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.