Book of My Nights (review)

The poems in Li-Young Lee's third collection have an insomniac quality, as if they were composed during a lengthy and troublesome bout with sleeplessness. Fortunately, Lee uses this brink, when the unconscious and conscious flow into each other, as a catalyst for writing beautiful poems, some of which are unforgettable for their vivid images, nocturnal mood, and graceful weaving of personal and universal concerns.

Lee casts us into his sleepless realm from the opening lines of the book. His poem "Pillow" begins,

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.

These first few lines set up Lee's conceit for Book of My Nights. Despite the weariness of the body and mind, the pillow, object upon which the head rests, conceals a lovely folding of images and sounds that the poet transmutes into verse. For Lee, night is not a metaphorical river that blends experience in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. Instead it is a bridge between "speaking and listening banks," with the word "banks" used to connote the levees of a river and also the "banks" of memory. A few lines later, Lee recalls the "houses of his childhood," in which his mother's fingers "let go of the thread / they've been tying and untying" and his father's hands are "setting the clock for resurrection." In his poems, Lee often uses the "tying and untying" of such memories to cope with sleeplessness and also to subvert the passage of time.

Li-Young Lee has always eschewed the postmodern condition of fragmentation in favor of synthesis, and what makes him a contemporary poet worth reading is that he remains true to his ideals without backsliding down the slope of solipsistic confessionalism. In "Pillow," his sleepless night is "a fortress, undefended and inviolate," a time of vulnerability that possibly echoes his feelings as a poet living in an age during which irony is prized over sentimentality. Though Lee's poems are intensely personal and perhaps too sentimental for some readers, they nearly always reach a universal summit where a wider audience can also revel in the view.

Lee reaches for universal themes by turning to his own family as his most prominent subject matter. In Book of My Nights, it is difficult to find a poem that doesn't mention one of his parents, siblings, or children. As in "Pillow," Lee envisions himself at a threshold, but often the threshold is between generations, a liminal place that links his children with his parents. This motif factors into fine poems such as "Heir to All," "The Eternal Son," and "Little Father," which concludes,

I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange one,
my little root who won't drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.

In this excerpt, Lee's poetic voice transcends gender by depicting himself as a maternal figure, all with the intent of nourishing his father's spirit beyond the effects of time. Its fluid rhythms evoke the dark, amniotic safety of the womb. Many of the poems in Book of My Nights feel as though they have been pulled from the body as well as the mind, as if the poet is the umbilical bond that links past to present to future.

The finest poem in the collection, one in which the aforementioned themes are most pronounced, is "The Hammock," which situates Lee in a hammock with his son in his lap, just as his mother once held him in her lap. The poem is a wonderfully straightforward and elegant rendering of family connections. It ends,

Between two unknowns, I live...