by Li-Young Lee
W.W. Norton 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

Relative Darkness

There’s a tremendous balancing act in Li-Young Lee’s poetry: the near-gush of sentimentia and nostalgia curbed by a dark, impenetrable, god-fearing neurosis. Our poet is isolated, fearful and death-obsessed, but he loves to cuddle with his wife. Nighttime is to Lee what high noon is to gunslingers: it provides time and space for an open showdown with the haunters and affronters that harry him by day. These specters—which include his late parents, the fact of human vileness, assorted memories, and of course, some notion of god—coalesce at night. They become one indefatigable mystery, and the poet is driven to interrogate them as such.

From the beginning, Lee established himself as a bona fide lyricist in an era of tubthumping conversationalists, and it’s a safe bet that the long-anticipated Behind My Eyes will further cement his position; despite the fact that is not his best book to date, don’t be surprised to see a National Book Award or Pulitzer nomination. Lee’s lyrical qualities emerge from unrest:

And the man who can’t sleep
and the man who can’t wake up
are the same man.

In these lines, the poet isn’t talking at us; he is presenting a hypothesis. There is constant inquiry in Lee. He sets out to come as close as he can to crystallizing the irresolvable metaphysical source of his unrest: what some might call the imagination, what others might call the divine. When a poem succeeds, it’s not just because the poet has proven his capacity to compose a poem; it is because in his scratching and drawing, the metaphysician has made a discovery, one that we as readers become equally privy to. These poems don’t read like poems that some guy wrote to scratch an itch; they are carefully grafted lyrical inquiries.

If the massless abstraction Lee quarrels with is generally crude in its silence, it has at least provided a stabilizing force: his late father, who has been central to many of Lee’s best poems. He appears throughout Behind My Eyes, for example, in “Descended from Dreamers”:

Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.

He had recently died,
and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.

Looking out the window,
one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,
while the other watched what continually emerged.

It could be said that Lee’s urge to position his dead father in his poems is played out. I don’t think this is the case. He is less the poet’s “father” than he is the image of the father as an entity made wise by death. The very idea of his father helps the poet put a face on blankness and to some extent, regulate his level of dread. He’s one of few poets able to make nostalgia work wonders.

Lee is deft at counterbalancing his imaginative obsessions with hard world evidence. Memories are one of Lee’s greatest imaginative obsessions; they are constantly paved over, betrayed or forgotten, as illustrated in “Descended from Dreamers”:

is any looking back a waste of time,
the whole of it a too finely woven
net of innumerable conditions,
causes, effects, countereffects, impossible
to read? Like rain on the surface of a pond.

Lee is careful with his simile. “Rain on the surface of a pond” is a familiar image, but the fact that the poet first “describes” the image through its metaphysical properties or its potential for metaphysical metaphor (one can visualize the “net of innumerable conditions”) allows the finite and the abstract to blend. More importantly, he is suggesting, not telling.

Sometimes Lee doesn’t do quite enough to counterbalance his wounded side. The book title itself is interesting as a suggestion that the poet’s awareness or unknowing takes place behind his eyes, eliminating any real distinction between “awake” and “asleep.” Yet, the title seems a little easy for Lee, even vaguely illogical, as behind the eyes seems too physical a location. Also, there has always been so much darkness/unknowing metaphor implicit in Lee’s “nights” that when he makes the metaphor explicit, it loses considerable thunder:

… Mother,
my first night with you lasted nine months.
Our second night together is the rest of my life.

“Night” is too blatant a stand-in for “unknowing” or “darkness” here. To be alive is to be in the dark; to term this a “night” is to apply too much force. A poem’s emotional quotient is made too obvious in other poems in Behind My Eyes. “A Hymn to My Childhood” begins:

Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn’t last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded up well in the backyard
and the ladder in the attic?

It’s not just that a lamentation over the loss of childhood or the development of fear is too easy or recognizable; it’s that the lines aren’t very challenging or even interesting. Nobody’s childhood has ever lasted, nor has such a thing ever been promised to anyone.  Next I start to consider whether anyone has actually wanted it to, and that’s a particularly bland line of thought. The boarded up well is a nice image; by the time I get there, his forgettable indictment of childhood is already fading.

More often than not—and such is the case with all of Lee’s books—a tendency toward sentimentality and cliché is there, but imbued with such lapidary lyrical wisdom that it’s qualified. Whatever the calmness of positioning in a poem, there is always the sense of something impending, something just out of reach that will bring either menace or salvation. The first poem in the book, “In His Own Shadow,” begins:

He is seated in the first darkness
of his body sitting in the lighter dark
of the room,

the greater light of day behind him,
beyond the windows, where
Time is the country.

Lee’s metaphorical darkness starts in a person’s body, and slowly patterns out into light. A complicated synergy emerges, reaffirmed in the closing lines to “Become Becoming”: “Then you’ll remember your life / as a book of candles, / each page read by the light of its own burning.” As each day is burned, so too are a million memories, and we’re left to parse out the debris and find, in Wallace Stevens’s words, “what will suffice.” For Li-Young Lee, it’s the search itself, for his readers, the reminder we’re always searching in the dark.

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