The city in which I love you : poems /

The publication of Li-Young Lee's second collection of poems is a welcome event. It is refreshing to read contemporary poems that are openly emotional and adventurous. These are full of passionate memory, resonant images of intimacy, and an inexorable sadness. Many of the poems, especially the title poem and "Furious Versions," are likely to find their way into anthologies and receive the wide readership they deserve. Lee's poems seem closest in style and impact to those of Galway Kinnell, another important poet who combines influences from Whitman and Rilke. What separates Lee's poems from those of Kinnell and others is their strong emphasis on memory. If there is a weakness in these poems, it is the absence of humor; even the tenderest love poems are suffused with sadness. Lee's expert handling of the long poem is also notable among poets of his generation. This book belongs in all collections of contemporary American poetry. L. Berk Florida Keys Community College

Warning: only read this book if you want to be moved to your bones. Lee's work has justly won this year's Lamont Award for best second book by an American poet (his first was Rose, BOA Editions, 1986). He writes with rare emotional intensity in long poems whose passion mounts to incendiary pitch. But he's a philosophic poet, too, asking profound questions about the possibility of love in modern life. His work is so deeply integrated that it's impossible to cite, for it is not the single excellent line that enraptures us, but the poem's totality. In the title poem, Lee captures the power of metaphysical lust in a transcendent incantation; in "The Cleaving," he encounters all immigrants, including himself, in the form of an old Chinese cook. These are but two of the many glories in this wonderful book. ~--Pat Monaghan

In these poems, the Lamott Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets for 1990, ``the cruel and the tender never/make peace.'' Throughout this book, Lee emphasizes the immigrant sensibility, the sense of otherness a newcomer brings to a strange land. There is an evocative, mysterious quality to these poems, a sensuality that splatters across the pages: ``Your hair is time, your thighs are song.'' Lee writes of the private sphere but a private sphere that has been warped by soldiers and exile, by political violence, ``the flag of some republic or other/ gallops like water or fire to tear itself away.'' At their cores these poems are about storytelling. Why? ``Because the world/ is so rich in detail, all of it so frail.'' Highly recommended.-- Doris Lynch, Oakland P.L., Cal. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.