{"id":9683,"date":"2018-07-09T00:33:59","date_gmt":"2018-07-08T23:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9683"},"modified":"2018-08-28T19:14:24","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T18:14:24","slug":"li-young-lee-the-undressing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9683","title":{"rendered":"Li-Young Lee | The Undressing<\/em><\/strong>| reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Li-Young Lee | The Undressing<\/em> | Norton \u00a320.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In a recent interview, Li-young Lee commented, \u2018I think poetry is the mind of God. All the great poems that I love seem to me to all have that little ingredient. You feel like you\u2019re in the presence of the mind of God.\u2019 Such utterances tend to scare people on this side of the Atlantic; people might agree with Lee\u2019s comments but they would be unlikely to say them. And Lee, who is much lauded on his<\/u> side of the Great Pond, is not afraid to embrace the vatic,<\/p>\n

I loved you before I was born.
\nIt doesn\u2019t make sense, I know.<\/p>\n

I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see.
\nAnd I\u2019ve lived longing
\nfor your every look ever since.
\n                                                      That longing entered time as this body.
\n                                                      And the longing grew as this body waxed.
\n                                                      And the longing grows as this body wanes.
\n                                                      That longing will outlive this body.
\n\t                                                                \u2018I loved you before I was born\u2019<\/p>\n

I kept mistyping that as \u2018I loved you before I was bone\u2019, which might suggest that somewhere inside me there is a rather \u2018blue-pencil\u2019 attitude to this writing. The first thing to notice is that the \u2018I\u2019 in this writing feels very much that it is Lee himself, the empirical Li-young Lee. The sense of address from the authorising consciousness of the poem is present throughout the whole of this book. And that would be fine, but such utterances quoted are rather bound to the writer, a way which can exclude. <\/p>\n

The next thing, perhaps, is those very end-stopped lines. The utterances are held in the line, and that sense of the vatic is emphasised in the simple sentences. Emphasis is also in the repetitions, which run from the past tense of \u2018entered\u2019 and \u2018grew\u2019, through the present of \u2018grows\u2019 to the future of \u2018will outlive\u2019, with the repeated complement of \u2018this body\u2019. Another way in which the utterances might feel a little clenched is the presence of the \u2018you\u2019. Since this \u2018you\u2019 is unparticularised, the reader is either left simply wondering who the \u2018you\u2019 is, or left feeling excluded by something the poet knows but isn\u2019t letting on. In fact, in a YouTube recording of the poet reading this poem, Lee comments that the \u2018you\u2019 is Sofia, for him, the Christian feminine embodiment of wisdom, but that is not so obvious on the page. <\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the book, Lee\u2019s back story emerges. His family is both eminent and touched with tragedy. Lee\u2019s maternal great-grandfather was China\u2019s first republican president. And his father was Mao\u2019s personal physician, until he took the family to Indonesia, where his father was imprisoned. This latter experience, Lee describes in the sequence \u2018Our Secret Shame\u2019. On a visit to his \u2018unrecognizable\u2019 father with Lee\u2019s mother, his mother slips a bar of soap to his father, \u2018\u2026I thought that the strange man had thieved it from her. As the guards were returning him to his cell, I ran after them and snatched the soap out of my father\u2019s pocket, exposing my parent\u2019s ploy.\u2019 Lee comments that he later learned from his father that although he had been tortured \u2018for lesser offences\u2019, this time the guards merely laughed; \u2018the reason was he\u2019d been teaching the prison guards in secret, at their request, to read and write in English, using the King James Bible.\u2019 <\/p>\n

The father that emerges from these poignant poems is of a forbidding presence, who is both feared and loved in equal measure. A Presbyterian minister, Lee\u2019s father would recite Chinese poems by heart and get his children to recite from the King James Bible, too. In the lovely, \u2018My Sweet Accompanist\u2019, Lee describes his father playing the accordion, while his son \u2018sang\/ my songs for him\u2019. After the performance, the father criticises the son\u2019s \u2018songs\u2019, <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t need your descriptions of my garden.
\nI planted everything in that garden.
\nI can read each leaf and bud
\nby sunlight, by moonlight, and by no light. <\/p>\n

And it is not only the son\u2019s lyricism which the father criticises, it is also the son\u2019s \u2018cleverness\u2019,<\/p>\n

Where your cleverness can\u2019t reach,
\nthere are victims in the world without a defender.
\nThe accusers are full of passion.
\nThe persecutors hated us without a cause.
\nThe ones who not know what they do are fierce,
\nthough sometimes they apologized before murdering their prey. <\/p>\n

Such comments from the father, in contrast with the earlier, somewhat rhetorical writing, do much to leaven the load in this book; and are, perhaps, the best parts in it. It is not simply that the father is the moral conscience of the book, he is also some of the weight which grounds other occasionally rhetorical writing. The relationship with not only the father, but the mother, brother and sister, put family and the contexts of Lee\u2019s family at the heart of the book, in ways which feel centripetal and robust. <\/p>\n

This centring is particularly useful as the final section of the book reaches out to a more overtly political subject matter. As the penultimate poem, \u2018Changing Places in the Fire\u2019 announces, Lee is unafraid to evoke the apocalyptic in his poetry. <\/p>\n

And this sparrow with a woman\u2019s face
\nroars in the burdened air \u2013 air crowded with voices,
\nbut no word, mobbed with talking by no word,
\nteeming with speech, but no word –
\nthis woman with the body of a bird
\nis shrieking fierce
\nbuzzed volts
\nin the swarming bubble, What\u2019s the Word!<\/p>\n

In contrast to earlier writing, the sentences are longer. And even if the clauses are substitute sentences, they are packed, paratactically, one after another, so that the illusion is created of the images running into each other. Within these continuities, Lee elides the subjects of verbs, so we have participles, such as \u2018crowded\u2019, \u2018mobbed\u2019, \u2018teeming\u2019, \u2018shrieking\u2019 and \u2018swarming\u2019 which wrest the syntax into density. The effect of the writing is to further energise the all ready charged imagery. The charge continues through this long, dramatic poem, which would clearly go down well at readings. <\/p>\n

The Undressing<\/em> is a wide ranging book in which Li-Young Lee shows himself a writer of considerable technical resource. Sometimes the poems simply seem too loud, not overwritten, as such but rather hectoring. There is a vastness to the poems with little sense of irony. But the best poems, which are mostly those about his family, have both an inner quietness and inner resolve, which make them compelling and moving. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Li-Young Lee | The Undressing | Norton \u00a320.00 In a recent interview, Li-young Lee commented, \u2018I think poetry is the mind of God. All the great poems that I love seem to me to all have that little ingredient. 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