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Book of My Nights: Poems
Book of My Nights is the first poetry collection in ten years by one of the world's most acclaimed young poets. In Book of My Nights, Li-Young Lee once again gives us lyrical poetry that fuses memory, family, culture and history. In language as simple and powerful as the human muscle, these poems work individually and as a full-sequence meditation on the vulnerability of humanity.
Li-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose, winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You, which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word, the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee's poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.
Li-Young Lee burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of Rose, winner of the 1986 Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from The Poetry Society of America. He followed that astonishing book with The City in Which I Love You, which was The Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets. Mr. Lee has appeared on National Public Radio a number of times and The Power of the Word, the PBS television series with Bill Moyers. Rose and The City in Which I Love You are in the 19th and 17th printings respectively, making them two of the highest-selling contemporary poetry books in the United States. Moreover, Mr. Lee's poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He currently lives in Chicago.
64 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2001
35 people are currently reading
1464 people want to read
About the author
Li-Young Lee
33 books409 followersLi-Young Lee is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. His father was exiled and spent a year in an Indonesian prison camp. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport.
Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he began to develop his love for writing. He had seen his father find his passion for ministry and as a result of his father reading to him and encouraging Lee to find his passion, Lee began to dive into the art of language. Lee’s writing has also been influenced by classic Chinese poets, Li Bo and Tu Fu. Many of Lee’s poems are filled with themes of simplicity, strength, and silence. All are strongly influenced by his family history, childhood, and individuality. He writes with simplicity and passion which creates images that take the reader deeper and also requires his audience to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. These feelings of exile and boldness to rebel take shape as they provide common themes for many of his poems.
Li-Young Lee has been an established Asian American poet who has been doing interviews for the past twenty years. Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll), is the first edited and published collection of interviews with an Asian American poet. In this collection, Earl G. Ingersoll asks "conversational" questions to bring out Lee’s views on Asian American poetry, writing, and identity.
Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he began to develop his love for writing. He had seen his father find his passion for ministry and as a result of his father reading to him and encouraging Lee to find his passion, Lee began to dive into the art of language. Lee’s writing has also been influenced by classic Chinese poets, Li Bo and Tu Fu. Many of Lee’s poems are filled with themes of simplicity, strength, and silence. All are strongly influenced by his family history, childhood, and individuality. He writes with simplicity and passion which creates images that take the reader deeper and also requires his audience to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. These feelings of exile and boldness to rebel take shape as they provide common themes for many of his poems.
Li-Young Lee has been an established Asian American poet who has been doing interviews for the past twenty years. Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll), is the first edited and published collection of interviews with an Asian American poet. In this collection, Earl G. Ingersoll asks "conversational" questions to bring out Lee’s views on Asian American poetry, writing, and identity.
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July 8, 2025
‘There are stars we haven’t heard from yet:
They have so far to arrive.’
Full of intensive introspective beauty, poet Li-Young Lee’s third collection, Book of My Nights reads as if each lyrical verse were drenched in the night sweats of insomnia, the words tossing and turning in the bed of their pages for a ‘moment in a wilderness of Who? Where?. It is like a mid-life crisis adorned in decorative lighting and quietly smoking on a porch in the summer breeze of a new moon; Book of My Nights is a velvety darkness in which terror and tranquility come hand in hand. His poems always open themselves to the reader so naturally they are as if flowers are blooming after a good, steady rain. They grow from soil nourished by tears but make something beautiful from such offerings. Told through a speaker ‘who lay down at evening / and woke at night / a stranger to himself,’ Lee revisits familiar themes from his earlier collections, such as the investigative prose digging up emotions for his father as found in Rose, yet also turns to gaze inward in order to contemplate an aging existence holding both the scars of childhood and the hopes and fears of adulthood. Blissfully brilliant and soothingly sagacious, Book of My Nights is a calm chaos of emotions come to life in such effortlessly engaging and accessible prose that can bore its way to incredible depths of heart and soul for quite the poignant read that lingers like smoke snaking its way skyward.
One Heart
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
Eventually we must all endure the dark night of the soul. There is no shame in having hit rock bottom in order to rise above, finding yourself through rebuilding yourself. Truthfully, I trust those who have experienced such calamity more than those who haven’t. The gentle quietude of Li-Young Lee’s poetry always nestles itself right into my head and heart and here we find them dashing up against such dark nights of anxious musings and existential inquiry that feels so familiar. Yet not in a way that might make one despair, but as if they are a favorite blanket draped over you as you endure a long, lonely night. Or, perhaps, a pillow, such as the poem Pillow that opens the collection and perfectly sets the tone and nocturnal stage:
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 is such a cozy intimacy here, lulled into the rhythm of dreams and ‘night songs’ adrift on the breeze. Lee, always an adept creator of complex imagery that balances strength and simplicity, allows for personal symbolism from childhood such as hyacinths and apple trees to transcend memoir into universally interpretable metaphors. In this way we all romp through the landscape of his dreams hand in hand.
Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
—from Night Mirror
Those familiar with Lee’s work will recognize the frequent musings on childhood and his parents. His father, in particular, appears in many of his poems, his father who had been the personal physician for Mao Zedong and fled with his family to Indonesia before once again fleeing due to anti-Chinese sentiments and eventually settling in the United States when Lee was 13 years old. His father is never far from him still, conjured in gorgeous lyricism such as ‘I buried my father in my heart / Now he grows in me, my strange son.’ Though Lee’s brother who ‘died too young to learn his name,’ as Lee writes in Black Petal, makes several appearances in Lee’s dreamlike state of contemplation:
And when clocks frighten me with their long hair,
and when I spy the wind’s numerous hands
in the orchard unfastening
first the petals from the buds,
then the perfume from the flesh,
my dead brother ministers to me. His voice
weighs nothing
but the far years between
stars in their massive dying,
and I grow quiet hearing
how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.
His brother returns again in Stations of the Sea, another example of Lee’s incredible gift of poetry graced by memoir, showing the inherited grief of adulthood and rationalizing the childhood that was born from it:
[O]f all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty.
of all my playmates,
my buried brother was the quietest,
never giving away my hiding place.
There is a heartfelt sense of healing at work in these poems, both for the speaker as he traces his life in lines of poetry, but also the reader who finds an empathetic soul speaking to them from each page. Its part of what makes his collections so filled with grace and humanity and why I continually come back for more. There is so much love bursting from the binding here.
Dwelling
As though touching her
might make him known to himself,
as though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her, a country
his hand’s traveling uncovered,
as though such a country arose
continually up out of her
to meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth.
And the places on her body have no names.
And she is what’s immense about the night.
And their clothes on the floor are arranged
for forgetfulness.
Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights is a gorgeous little volume of work that perfectly embodies the essence of a sleepless night wracked by introspective contemplation. Calm yet full of life, and delivered through vibrant imagery and soothing lyricism, this is a marvel of a collection that moves with a dreamlike quality. Li-Young Lee is such an incredible and inimitable poet and while I think I still prefer his previous collection, Rose, his Book of My Nights is still such a towering testament to his craft.
4.5/5
Heir to All
What I spill in a dream
runs under my door,
ahead of my arrival
and the year's wide round,
to meet me in the color of hills
at dawn, or else collected
in a flower's name
I trace with my finger
in a book. Proving
only this: Listening is the ground
below my sleep,
where decision is born, and
whoever's heard the title
autumn knows him by
is heir to all those
unfurnished rooms inside the roses.
They have so far to arrive.’
Full of intensive introspective beauty, poet Li-Young Lee’s third collection, Book of My Nights reads as if each lyrical verse were drenched in the night sweats of insomnia, the words tossing and turning in the bed of their pages for a ‘moment in a wilderness of Who? Where?. It is like a mid-life crisis adorned in decorative lighting and quietly smoking on a porch in the summer breeze of a new moon; Book of My Nights is a velvety darkness in which terror and tranquility come hand in hand. His poems always open themselves to the reader so naturally they are as if flowers are blooming after a good, steady rain. They grow from soil nourished by tears but make something beautiful from such offerings. Told through a speaker ‘who lay down at evening / and woke at night / a stranger to himself,’ Lee revisits familiar themes from his earlier collections, such as the investigative prose digging up emotions for his father as found in Rose, yet also turns to gaze inward in order to contemplate an aging existence holding both the scars of childhood and the hopes and fears of adulthood. Blissfully brilliant and soothingly sagacious, Book of My Nights is a calm chaos of emotions come to life in such effortlessly engaging and accessible prose that can bore its way to incredible depths of heart and soul for quite the poignant read that lingers like smoke snaking its way skyward.
One Heart
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
Eventually we must all endure the dark night of the soul. There is no shame in having hit rock bottom in order to rise above, finding yourself through rebuilding yourself. Truthfully, I trust those who have experienced such calamity more than those who haven’t. The gentle quietude of Li-Young Lee’s poetry always nestles itself right into my head and heart and here we find them dashing up against such dark nights of anxious musings and existential inquiry that feels so familiar. Yet not in a way that might make one despair, but as if they are a favorite blanket draped over you as you endure a long, lonely night. Or, perhaps, a pillow, such as the poem Pillow that opens the collection and perfectly sets the tone and nocturnal stage:
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 is such a cozy intimacy here, lulled into the rhythm of dreams and ‘night songs’ adrift on the breeze. Lee, always an adept creator of complex imagery that balances strength and simplicity, allows for personal symbolism from childhood such as hyacinths and apple trees to transcend memoir into universally interpretable metaphors. In this way we all romp through the landscape of his dreams hand in hand.
Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
—from Night Mirror
Those familiar with Lee’s work will recognize the frequent musings on childhood and his parents. His father, in particular, appears in many of his poems, his father who had been the personal physician for Mao Zedong and fled with his family to Indonesia before once again fleeing due to anti-Chinese sentiments and eventually settling in the United States when Lee was 13 years old. His father is never far from him still, conjured in gorgeous lyricism such as ‘I buried my father in my heart / Now he grows in me, my strange son.’ Though Lee’s brother who ‘died too young to learn his name,’ as Lee writes in Black Petal, makes several appearances in Lee’s dreamlike state of contemplation:
And when clocks frighten me with their long hair,
and when I spy the wind’s numerous hands
in the orchard unfastening
first the petals from the buds,
then the perfume from the flesh,
my dead brother ministers to me. His voice
weighs nothing
but the far years between
stars in their massive dying,
and I grow quiet hearing
how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.
His brother returns again in Stations of the Sea, another example of Lee’s incredible gift of poetry graced by memoir, showing the inherited grief of adulthood and rationalizing the childhood that was born from it:
[O]f all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty.
of all my playmates,
my buried brother was the quietest,
never giving away my hiding place.
There is a heartfelt sense of healing at work in these poems, both for the speaker as he traces his life in lines of poetry, but also the reader who finds an empathetic soul speaking to them from each page. Its part of what makes his collections so filled with grace and humanity and why I continually come back for more. There is so much love bursting from the binding here.
Dwelling
As though touching her
might make him known to himself,
as though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her, a country
his hand’s traveling uncovered,
as though such a country arose
continually up out of her
to meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth.
And the places on her body have no names.
And she is what’s immense about the night.
And their clothes on the floor are arranged
for forgetfulness.
Li-Young Lee’s Book of My Nights is a gorgeous little volume of work that perfectly embodies the essence of a sleepless night wracked by introspective contemplation. Calm yet full of life, and delivered through vibrant imagery and soothing lyricism, this is a marvel of a collection that moves with a dreamlike quality. Li-Young Lee is such an incredible and inimitable poet and while I think I still prefer his previous collection, Rose, his Book of My Nights is still such a towering testament to his craft.
4.5/5
Heir to All
What I spill in a dream
runs under my door,
ahead of my arrival
and the year's wide round,
to meet me in the color of hills
at dawn, or else collected
in a flower's name
I trace with my finger
in a book. Proving
only this: Listening is the ground
below my sleep,
where decision is born, and
whoever's heard the title
autumn knows him by
is heir to all those
unfurnished rooms inside the roses.
December 30, 2020
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
February 9, 2016
Echo and Shadow
A room
and a room. And between them
she leans in the doorway
to say something,
lintel bright above her face,
threshold dark beneath her feet,
her hands behind her head gathering
her hair to tie and tuck at the nape.
A world and a world.
Dying and not dying.
And between them
the curtains blowing
and the shadows they make on her body,
a shadow of birds, a single flock,
a myriad body of wings and cries
turning and diving in complex unison.
Shadow of bells,
or the shadow of the sound
they make in the air, mornings, evenings,
everywhere I wait for her,
as even now her voice
seems a lasting echo
of my heart’s calling me home, its story
an ocean beyond my human beginning,
each wave tolling the whole note
of my outcome and belonging.
Dwelling
As though touching her
might make him known to himself,
as though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her, a country
his hand's traveling uncovered,
as though such a country arose
continually up out of her
to meet his hand's setting forth and setting forth.
And the places on her body have no names.
And she is what's immense about the night.
And their clothes on the floor are arranged
for forgetfulness.
March 2, 2015
These are poems about beginnings, about families, about the search for a god. I also love that Mr. Lee in his biography says nothing of any MFA and that he works in a warehouse. My kind of poet.
March 11, 2008
In his third collection of poems, Li-Young Lee delves into the world of an insomniac who spends his sleepless nights ruminating on generational divides and what behaviors, emotions and burdens are passed from parents to children. His signature meditative tone is as strong as ever in these poems, mixing melodic, iambic lines with staccato statements that jump out with their poignancy, exemplified in the sublime eight-line piece, “One Heart” (41). This volume is filled with luminous moments, for Lee does best when leashing lofty concepts like freedom to images from the natural world. He also does much to elucidate human behavior by comparing it to patterns in nature. However, sometimes he lets his speaker get a little too lost in this wonderment, and the poems get bogged down by too many questions, as in the piece “Hurry toward Beginning” (11-12), in which all but four of its twenty-two sentences are questions. Regardless, the work it takes to skim through these less powerful pieces is worth it to find the moments that stay with me and, like “One Heart,” make me think, feel and react each time I see a bird lift with ease from a branch onto their wings and the air.
June 19, 2021
Beautiful and haunting. Read on a sleepless night and loved everything it made me feel.
January 21, 2008
Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001)
Every time I find myself ready to crown a single person the foremost voice in American poetry (the candidate at present being Charles Simic), a book comes along by some other author I've forgotten who relegates the candidate to a shortlist. He undermining principle today is Li-Young Lee's Book of My Nights. I'd read The City in Which I Love You some years ago, thought it wonderful, and then promptly forgotten about Lee, who is of that school of poets who releases a book every seven or eight years. This is his most recent, and it is fantastic.
The subgenre of poetry best classified as "zen koan poems" has been greatly denigrated in Western literature, thanks in no small part to a bunch of bad amateurs in the fifties and sixties whose work persists in the public memory to this day. (I'm sure I don't need to name names. It's that impenetrable merde you came across in various literary magazines and the like that made you think "what on earth is this person on about?") The zen koan makes you think, not dismiss. Li-Young Lee seems to have taken the unenviable task upon himself to return the poetic version of the zen koan to the literary heights which it by rights should hold, and in The Book of My Nights, he takes great steps toward that goal.
Centering, as one would surmise from the title, around such topics as dreams and insomnia, Book of My Nights showcases Lee's considerable prowess with putting together strings of words aimed at making the reader contemplate some question that has no definitive answer; either it is unanswerable or every person will have his own different answer to the question.
"When he returns to the tale,
the page is dark,
and the leaves at the window have been traveling
beside his silent reading
as long as he can remember.
Where is his father?
When will his mother be home?
How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?"
(from "Degrees of Blue")
Lee's book-length poetic output may be small (Book of My Nights is his third book of poems), but it is wonderful for all that. Lee is a great American poet, and deserves an audience as such. ****
Every time I find myself ready to crown a single person the foremost voice in American poetry (the candidate at present being Charles Simic), a book comes along by some other author I've forgotten who relegates the candidate to a shortlist. He undermining principle today is Li-Young Lee's Book of My Nights. I'd read The City in Which I Love You some years ago, thought it wonderful, and then promptly forgotten about Lee, who is of that school of poets who releases a book every seven or eight years. This is his most recent, and it is fantastic.
The subgenre of poetry best classified as "zen koan poems" has been greatly denigrated in Western literature, thanks in no small part to a bunch of bad amateurs in the fifties and sixties whose work persists in the public memory to this day. (I'm sure I don't need to name names. It's that impenetrable merde you came across in various literary magazines and the like that made you think "what on earth is this person on about?") The zen koan makes you think, not dismiss. Li-Young Lee seems to have taken the unenviable task upon himself to return the poetic version of the zen koan to the literary heights which it by rights should hold, and in The Book of My Nights, he takes great steps toward that goal.
Centering, as one would surmise from the title, around such topics as dreams and insomnia, Book of My Nights showcases Lee's considerable prowess with putting together strings of words aimed at making the reader contemplate some question that has no definitive answer; either it is unanswerable or every person will have his own different answer to the question.
"When he returns to the tale,
the page is dark,
and the leaves at the window have been traveling
beside his silent reading
as long as he can remember.
Where is his father?
When will his mother be home?
How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?"
(from "Degrees of Blue")
Lee's book-length poetic output may be small (Book of My Nights is his third book of poems), but it is wonderful for all that. Lee is a great American poet, and deserves an audience as such. ****
Read
February 22, 2024for me this one was a mixed bag
February 26, 2010
This is a beautiful collection-- Lee has a gift for wedding the mundane to the ethereal. Again and again I had to choke back the tears that come from being read by the poems, the surprise of being known by the poems, somehow . He locates the utterly human through the spectacularly particular lens of his own experience. Lovely.
A favorite:
Little Round
Li-Young Lee
My fool asks: Do the years spell a path to later
be remembered? Who’s there to read them back?
My death says: One bird knows the hour and suffers
to house its millstone-weight as song.
My night watchman lies down
in a room by the sea
and hears the water telling,
out of a thousand mouths,
the story behind his mother’s sleeping face.
My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks
who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.
My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.
And my child? He sleeps and sleeps.
And my mother? She divides
the rice, today’s portion from tomorrow’s,
tomorrow’s from ever after.
And my father. He faces me and rows
toward what he can’t see.
And my God.
What have I done with my God?
A favorite:
Little Round
Li-Young Lee
My fool asks: Do the years spell a path to later
be remembered? Who’s there to read them back?
My death says: One bird knows the hour and suffers
to house its millstone-weight as song.
My night watchman lies down
in a room by the sea
and hears the water telling,
out of a thousand mouths,
the story behind his mother’s sleeping face.
My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks
who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.
My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.
And my child? He sleeps and sleeps.
And my mother? She divides
the rice, today’s portion from tomorrow’s,
tomorrow’s from ever after.
And my father. He faces me and rows
toward what he can’t see.
And my God.
What have I done with my God?
January 7, 2023
These poems are about fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, and a dead one, and what they are made of: light, darkness, shadows, colors, days, nights, stars, flesh, beauty, ugliness and so, so, so many wonders.
These are a great part of why these poems are so intense and beautiful: because they somehow show that we are made of despair and hope too.
These are a great part of why these poems are so intense and beautiful: because they somehow show that we are made of despair and hope too.
August 24, 2018
Reading this I felt as though a force was pushing my heart to sit still in my rib cage.
November 21, 2020
3.5
I think I like his earlier poems more than the later ones. Who knows.
I think I like his earlier poems more than the later ones. Who knows.
June 12, 2022
*Out of Hiding*
Someone said my name in the garden,
while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of the peonies,
grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient
under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.
When I heard my name again, it sounded far, like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,
while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.
Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.
~Li-Young Lee
Someone said my name in the garden,
while I grew smaller
in the spreading shadow of the peonies,
grew larger by my absence to another,
grew older among the ants, ancient
under the opening heads of the flowers,
new to myself, and stranger.
When I heard my name again, it sounded far, like the name of the child next door,
or a favorite cousin visiting for the summer,
while the quiet seemed my true name,
a near and inaudible singing
born of hidden ground.
Quiet to quiet, I called back.
And the birds declared my whereabouts all morning.
~Li-Young Lee
November 29, 2019
One Heart
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
Read
December 27, 2021“…and that’s why you can’t sleep except by forgetting / you can’t love except by remembering.”
(from “Restless”)
(from “Restless”)
February 7, 2022
Beautiful book of poetry, very much needed in this endless winter.
See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree even barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
See
how three birds in a winter tree
make the tree even barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms
open in December.
April 24, 2024
lovely lovely wonderful feels like a breath of fresh air. as closest to Mary Oliver's works as I've ever read. will definitely re-read this
February 25, 2025
My Father’s House
Here, as in childhood, Brother, no one sees us.
And someone has died, and someone is not yet born.
Our father walks through his church at night
and sets all the clocks for spring. His sleeplessness
weighs heavy on my forehead, his death almost
nothing. In the letter he never wrote to us
he says, No one can tell how long it takes a seed
to declare what death and lightning told it
while it slept. But stand at a window long enough,
late enough, and you may some night hear
a secret you’ll tomorrow, parallel to the morning,
tell on a wide, white bed, to a woman
like a sown ledge of wheat. Or you may never
tell it, who lean across the night and miles of the sea,
to arrive at a seed, in whose lamplit house
resides a thorn, or a wee man carving
a name on a stone, the name of the one who has died,
the name of the one not born unknown.
Someone has died. Someone is not yet born.
And during this black interval,
I sweep all three floors of our father’s house,
and I don’t count the broom strokes; I row
up and down for nothing but love: his for me, my own
for the threshold, and for the woman’s voice
I hear while I sweep, as though she swept beside me,
a woman whose face, if she owns a face at all,
is its own changing. And if I know her name
I know to say it so softly she need not
stop her work to hear me. Though when she lies down
at night, in the room of our arrival,
she’ll know I called her.
And when she answers it’s morning,
which even now is overwhelming, the woman
combing her hair opposite to my departure.
And only now and then do I lean at a jamb
to see if I can see what I thought I heard.
I heard her ask, My love, why can’t you sleep?
and answer, Someone has died, and someone
is not yet born. Meanwhile, I hear the voices
of women telling a story in the round,
and I sit down on the rough stoop, by the sea grass,
and go on folding the laundry I was folding,
the everyday clothes of our everyday life, the death
clothes wearing us clean to the bone.
And I know the tide is rising early,
and I can’t hope to trap the story
told in the round. But the woman I know
says, Sleep, so I lie down on the clothes,
the folded and unfolded, the life and the death.
Ages go by. When I wake, the story has changed
the firmament into domain, domain
into a house, and the sun speaks the day,
unnaming, showing the telling, dissipating
the boundaries of the story to include
the one who has died and the one not yet born.
How still the morning grows about the voice
of one child reading to another.
How much a house is house at all due
to one room where an elder child reads
to his brother. And the younger knows by heart
the brother-voice. How dark the other rooms,
how slow morning comes
collected in a name
told at one sill
and listened for at the threshold of dew.
What book is this we read
together, Brother, and at which window
of our father’s house? In which upper room?
We read it twice: once in two voices, to each other,
and once in unison, to children
and the sun, our star, that vast office
we sit inside while birds lend their church
sown in air, realized in a body uttering
windows, growing rafters, couching seeds.
*
March 1, 2021
Simple, spare, beautiful like the light is at altitude, at 11,000 feet, above treeline, snows acting like snow never does at sea level, like fog and smoke and sand, the light actually acting like no other light, and these poems reminded me of life pared and whittled into essentials, into heart, astonishment, sky, birds, family, voice. Like this:
ONE HEART
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
A TABLE IN THE WILDERNESS
I draw a window
And a man sitting inside it.
I draw a bird in flight about 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.
DWELLING
As though touching her
Might make him known to himself,
As though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her, a country
His hand’s traveling uncovered,
As though such a country arose
Continually out of her
To meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth…
As even now her voice
Seems a lasting echo
Of my heart’s calling me home, its story
An ocean beyond my human beginning,
each wave tolling the whole note
of my outcome and belonging.
THE OTHER HOURS
When I listen to the wind in the trees,
I hear- or is it someone inside me hears-
The far voice of a woman reading out loud
From a book that opens everywhere onto day.
Her voice makes a place, and the birds
Go there carrying nothing but the sky…
IN THE BEGINNING
A woman is speaking in a place of rocks.
Her voice is the water of the place
And founds the time there.
She says the world, begun out of nothing,
Stands by turning,
Out of grasp a lover’s yes and no,
Stay and go, singing stepping
In and out of time and momentum,
The body’s doctrine
Of need and scarcity,
The heart’s full measure
Of night and day, sons and daughters.
A woman is talking. Her voice
Is a boat and oars in a place of rocks.
Stranded in a rocky place,
It is a garment torn to pieces.
It is the light
Accomplished by wind and fire,
Abiding inside the rocks.
A memory of the sea, it’s what remains.
Homesickness in the rocks.
Homecoming in the trees.
PRAISE THEM
The birds don’t alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
Never fills with any
Leftover flying. They leave
Nothing to trace.
It is our own
Astonishment collects
In chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
Moment never begging,
And never enter ours
Without parting day….
If even one of our violent number
Could be gentle
Long enough that one of them
Found it safe inside
Our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
Who wouldn’t hear
What singing completes us?
LITTLE FATHER
I buried my father
In the sky.
Since then, the birds
Clean and comb him every morning
And pull the blanket up to his chin
Every night.
I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see pas them
To the tables spread for a wedding feast.
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
My little root…little clock spring….
Little grape, parent to the future
Wine, a son of the fruit of his own son,
Little father I ransom with my life.
Excerpts:
Let him go in search of the hiding place
Of the dew, where the hours are born.
Let him uncover who heart
Beats behind the falling leaves.
___
And singing collects the earth
About my rest,
Making of my heart
The way home.
___
Something about our beginningless past.
Maybe. Maybe our river, dreaming out loud,
Folds story and forgetting.
___
Listen. Whose footsteps are those
Hurrying toward beginning?
____
My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
Inside their numbered rooms. When nigh asks
Who I am I answer, your own, and am not lonely.
____
This night, the near ground
Every reaching-out-to overreaches,
Just to remind himself
Out of what little earth and duration,
Out of what immense good-bye,
Each must make a safe place of his heart,
Before so strange and wild a guest
As God approaches.
___
He’ll declare the birds
Have eaten the path home, but each of us
Joins night’s ongoing story
Wherever night overtakes him,
The heart astonished to find belonging
And thanks answering thanks.
I grow quiet hearing
How many of both our tomorrows
Lie waiting inside it to be born.
___
One who went while the time seemed green
For going, or a oice
One room ahead of our own dreaming, and we die
At the crest of each day’s spending
Away. As prow and the surrendered foam
Go on forgetting, our very looking is the light
Feasting on the light. As for hunger,
Each must cross to a body as yet unnamed.
Who needs a heart unless it’s one we share
With a many-windowed sea? A heart…
Is the very wheel installing day, the well
from which paired hands set out, happy
to undress a terrifying and abundant yes.
____
Listening is the ground
Below my sleep,
Where decision is born, and
Whoever’s heard the title
Autumn knows him by
Is heir to tall those
Unfurnished rooms inside the roses.
___
When I wake, the story has changed
The firmament into domanin, domain
Into a house, and the sun speaks the day,
Unnaming, showing the telling, dissipating
The boundaries of the story to include
The one who has died, and the one not yet born.
How slow morning comes,
Sown in air, realized in a body uttering
Windows, growing rafters, couching seeds.
___
ONE HEART
Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open
at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.
A TABLE IN THE WILDERNESS
I draw a window
And a man sitting inside it.
I draw a bird in flight about 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.
DWELLING
As though touching her
Might make him known to himself,
As though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her, a country
His hand’s traveling uncovered,
As though such a country arose
Continually out of her
To meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth…
As even now her voice
Seems a lasting echo
Of my heart’s calling me home, its story
An ocean beyond my human beginning,
each wave tolling the whole note
of my outcome and belonging.
THE OTHER HOURS
When I listen to the wind in the trees,
I hear- or is it someone inside me hears-
The far voice of a woman reading out loud
From a book that opens everywhere onto day.
Her voice makes a place, and the birds
Go there carrying nothing but the sky…
IN THE BEGINNING
A woman is speaking in a place of rocks.
Her voice is the water of the place
And founds the time there.
She says the world, begun out of nothing,
Stands by turning,
Out of grasp a lover’s yes and no,
Stay and go, singing stepping
In and out of time and momentum,
The body’s doctrine
Of need and scarcity,
The heart’s full measure
Of night and day, sons and daughters.
A woman is talking. Her voice
Is a boat and oars in a place of rocks.
Stranded in a rocky place,
It is a garment torn to pieces.
It is the light
Accomplished by wind and fire,
Abiding inside the rocks.
A memory of the sea, it’s what remains.
Homesickness in the rocks.
Homecoming in the trees.
PRAISE THEM
The birds don’t alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
Never fills with any
Leftover flying. They leave
Nothing to trace.
It is our own
Astonishment collects
In chill air. Be glad.
They equal their due
Moment never begging,
And never enter ours
Without parting day….
If even one of our violent number
Could be gentle
Long enough that one of them
Found it safe inside
Our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze,
Who wouldn’t hear
What singing completes us?
LITTLE FATHER
I buried my father
In the sky.
Since then, the birds
Clean and comb him every morning
And pull the blanket up to his chin
Every night.
I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see pas them
To the tables spread for a wedding feast.
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
My little root…little clock spring….
Little grape, parent to the future
Wine, a son of the fruit of his own son,
Little father I ransom with my life.
Excerpts:
Let him go in search of the hiding place
Of the dew, where the hours are born.
Let him uncover who heart
Beats behind the falling leaves.
___
And singing collects the earth
About my rest,
Making of my heart
The way home.
___
Something about our beginningless past.
Maybe. Maybe our river, dreaming out loud,
Folds story and forgetting.
___
Listen. Whose footsteps are those
Hurrying toward beginning?
____
My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
Inside their numbered rooms. When nigh asks
Who I am I answer, your own, and am not lonely.
____
This night, the near ground
Every reaching-out-to overreaches,
Just to remind himself
Out of what little earth and duration,
Out of what immense good-bye,
Each must make a safe place of his heart,
Before so strange and wild a guest
As God approaches.
___
He’ll declare the birds
Have eaten the path home, but each of us
Joins night’s ongoing story
Wherever night overtakes him,
The heart astonished to find belonging
And thanks answering thanks.
I grow quiet hearing
How many of both our tomorrows
Lie waiting inside it to be born.
___
One who went while the time seemed green
For going, or a oice
One room ahead of our own dreaming, and we die
At the crest of each day’s spending
Away. As prow and the surrendered foam
Go on forgetting, our very looking is the light
Feasting on the light. As for hunger,
Each must cross to a body as yet unnamed.
Who needs a heart unless it’s one we share
With a many-windowed sea? A heart…
Is the very wheel installing day, the well
from which paired hands set out, happy
to undress a terrifying and abundant yes.
____
Listening is the ground
Below my sleep,
Where decision is born, and
Whoever’s heard the title
Autumn knows him by
Is heir to tall those
Unfurnished rooms inside the roses.
___
When I wake, the story has changed
The firmament into domanin, domain
Into a house, and the sun speaks the day,
Unnaming, showing the telling, dissipating
The boundaries of the story to include
The one who has died, and the one not yet born.
How slow morning comes,
Sown in air, realized in a body uttering
Windows, growing rafters, couching seeds.
___
May 6, 2008
The poem "Praise Them" is reason enough on its own to buy this book. Lee's characteristic melancholy and spareness soak the poem, and its insight and imagery open up a huge space in my head.
Here are the opening lines:
"The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad."
Birds and the sky figure throughout the collection, along with meditations on family--"Another word for father is worry"--and nature--"Regarding springtime, what is there to conclude"?. Lee's straightforwardness makes him accessible, but I always feel there's a deep tunnel under all his words. There is nothing casual about his writing, and not much that's light, either. Much of it is beautiful and welcoming, though.
Here are the opening lines:
"The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad."
Birds and the sky figure throughout the collection, along with meditations on family--"Another word for father is worry"--and nature--"Regarding springtime, what is there to conclude"?. Lee's straightforwardness makes him accessible, but I always feel there's a deep tunnel under all his words. There is nothing casual about his writing, and not much that's light, either. Much of it is beautiful and welcoming, though.
December 8, 2012
One of my favorite poems from this collection is "Praise Them."
The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it . . .
another favorite is "Pillow."
There's nothing I can't find under there.
Voices in the trees, the missing pages
of the sea.
Everything but sleep.
*
Other excerpts I like:
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.
"A Table in the Wilderness"
Is it because the hour is late/the dove sounds new
"Hurry Toward Beginning"
It's a little like returning to the village
where you were born, the sad bewilderment
of discrepancies between
what you remember and what's there.
"Discrepancies, Happy and Sad"
The moon from any window is one part
whoever's looking.
"The Moon from any Window"
The birds don't alter space.
They reveal it . . .
another favorite is "Pillow."
There's nothing I can't find under there.
Voices in the trees, the missing pages
of the sea.
Everything but sleep.
*
Other excerpts I like:
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.
"A Table in the Wilderness"
Is it because the hour is late/the dove sounds new
"Hurry Toward Beginning"
It's a little like returning to the village
where you were born, the sad bewilderment
of discrepancies between
what you remember and what's there.
"Discrepancies, Happy and Sad"
The moon from any window is one part
whoever's looking.
"The Moon from any Window"
April 3, 2013
Perfect book to read after Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. Lee's work embodies so much of Bachelard's ideas of an archetypal, emotional space of architecture and childhood (and, in Lee's case, of family and generations). Though Lee definitely veers on the side of minimalism (and Bachelard, the eccentric, amazing-haired frenchman, has a more voluptuous, exaggerated style), he creates an atmosphere/fabric of dream, revery, desire (but also regret), embodied in words (and pictures: see: "A Table in the Wilderness") that I think Bachelard would have enjoyed and heralded. These stripped, dense and simple (dense in meaning, simple in language), poems read like one large, interwoven poem: webs within a web. Lee's style works well as the motifs, like the accrual of nights, deepen.
January 14, 2016
Hammock & Restless were the most accessible of all poems.I didn't do justice by reading all poems in one sitting but then these poems are unyielding, & make little sense even after several slow,attentive reads.His sentences are smooth fluent lyrical, easy to read but the gaps in between the lines are as wide as those between the stars i.e, hard to cover in one leap.
Read
September 26, 2008There were poems here that really blew me away, then poems that I enjoyed but did not grab me by the throat... that's the only reason for stars less than four. I think, too, that I'm harder on Lee than perhaps a less-known poet because I'm such a fan. I have high expectations.
October 20, 2015
Really enjoyed this. Has kind of a languid lyricism, which was pleasant and oddly invigorating.
It felt like love and melancholic nights. It felt like life.
Great stuff.
It felt like love and melancholic nights. It felt like life.
Great stuff.
Read
August 19, 2022“I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.
I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
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.”
A dove! I said.
What I meant was all the colors
from ashes to singing.
What I meant was news
of my death,
a threshold
dividing my unmade tears
from the finished song.
Night, I said.
As in, Night after night,
as in, Every night is two nights,
a house under a hill. Night,
as in, Night adds to night
without remainder,
and all the nights are one
night, a book
whose every word is outcome,
whose every page is lifelong sentence.
What I meant was the wind
burying the dead.
What I should have said was:
A hand fallen still
at the foot of the burning hours,
paused between the written and the unwritten.
It was a mourning dove in my eaves.
And maybe I meant to say:
Child of time.
Maybe I should have called out:
Child of eternity.
Or did I only mean to
ask, Whose face
did I glimpse last night in a dream?”
____
“I can hear in your voice
you were born in one country
and will die in another,
and where you live is where you’ll be buried,
and when you dream it’s where you were born,
and the moon never hangs in both skies
on the same night,
and that’s why you think the moon has a sister,
that’s why your day is hostage to your nights,
and that’s why you can’t sleep except by forgetting,
you can’t love except by remembering.
And that’s why you’re divided: yes and no.
I want to die. I want to live.”
“I can hear by what you say
your first words must have been mother and father.
Even before your own name, mother.
Long before amen, father.
And you put one word in your left shoe,
one in your right, and you go walking.
And when you lie down you tuck them
under your pillow, where they give rise
to other words: childhood, fate, and rescue.
Heaven, wine, return.
And even god and death are offspring.
Even world is begotten, even summer
a descendant. And the apple tree. Look and see
the entire lineage alive
in every leaf and branching
decision, snug inside each fast bud,
”
“together in the flower, and again
in the pulp, mingling in the fragrance
of the first mouthful and the last.
I can tell by your silence you’ve seen the petals
immense in their vanishing.
Flying, they build your only dwelling.
Falling, they sow shadows at your feet.
And when you close your eyes
you can hear the ancient fountains
from which they derive,
rock and water ceaselessly declaring
the laws of coming and going.”
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.
I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
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.”
A dove! I said.
What I meant was all the colors
from ashes to singing.
What I meant was news
of my death,
a threshold
dividing my unmade tears
from the finished song.
Night, I said.
As in, Night after night,
as in, Every night is two nights,
a house under a hill. Night,
as in, Night adds to night
without remainder,
and all the nights are one
night, a book
whose every word is outcome,
whose every page is lifelong sentence.
What I meant was the wind
burying the dead.
What I should have said was:
A hand fallen still
at the foot of the burning hours,
paused between the written and the unwritten.
It was a mourning dove in my eaves.
And maybe I meant to say:
Child of time.
Maybe I should have called out:
Child of eternity.
Or did I only mean to
ask, Whose face
did I glimpse last night in a dream?”
____
“I can hear in your voice
you were born in one country
and will die in another,
and where you live is where you’ll be buried,
and when you dream it’s where you were born,
and the moon never hangs in both skies
on the same night,
and that’s why you think the moon has a sister,
that’s why your day is hostage to your nights,
and that’s why you can’t sleep except by forgetting,
you can’t love except by remembering.
And that’s why you’re divided: yes and no.
I want to die. I want to live.”
“I can hear by what you say
your first words must have been mother and father.
Even before your own name, mother.
Long before amen, father.
And you put one word in your left shoe,
one in your right, and you go walking.
And when you lie down you tuck them
under your pillow, where they give rise
to other words: childhood, fate, and rescue.
Heaven, wine, return.
And even god and death are offspring.
Even world is begotten, even summer
a descendant. And the apple tree. Look and see
the entire lineage alive
in every leaf and branching
decision, snug inside each fast bud,
”
“together in the flower, and again
in the pulp, mingling in the fragrance
of the first mouthful and the last.
I can tell by your silence you’ve seen the petals
immense in their vanishing.
Flying, they build your only dwelling.
Falling, they sow shadows at your feet.
And when you close your eyes
you can hear the ancient fountains
from which they derive,
rock and water ceaselessly declaring
the laws of coming and going.”
Read
September 12, 2023And the places on her body have no names.
And she is what's immense about the night.
So many LYL lines just make me go !!!!!! like the ones above. This is the last collection of his that I hadn't read and I'm really sad to be done reading his work for the first time, though I know I'll return to it again and again. While this was my least favorite of the five collections, I did of course enjoy it, especially after having gone a couple months reading other poets. I had found myself missing his voice-- that feeling of trying to recall the details of a dream. The five collections together in my mind do create a sort of dream world with a strange and delicate landscape. He's made his own language in his poetry. Hair, birds, night, water, singing, roses...these are mentioned over and over again, and they each represent different things than what they are. Even when I don't quite understand what's happening it's enough to just read the words like they're a beautiful puzzle that I don't need to solve, that might be better for being unsolvable. I remember being sort of baffled the first time I read one of his books, but by the third one I began to learn that language of his and became comfortable sitting inside of it.
Anyway, I adore him. This collection isn't his best (imo), but I'm still looking forward to the day when I reread it.
And she is what's immense about the night.
So many LYL lines just make me go !!!!!! like the ones above. This is the last collection of his that I hadn't read and I'm really sad to be done reading his work for the first time, though I know I'll return to it again and again. While this was my least favorite of the five collections, I did of course enjoy it, especially after having gone a couple months reading other poets. I had found myself missing his voice-- that feeling of trying to recall the details of a dream. The five collections together in my mind do create a sort of dream world with a strange and delicate landscape. He's made his own language in his poetry. Hair, birds, night, water, singing, roses...these are mentioned over and over again, and they each represent different things than what they are. Even when I don't quite understand what's happening it's enough to just read the words like they're a beautiful puzzle that I don't need to solve, that might be better for being unsolvable. I remember being sort of baffled the first time I read one of his books, but by the third one I began to learn that language of his and became comfortable sitting inside of it.
Anyway, I adore him. This collection isn't his best (imo), but I'm still looking forward to the day when I reread it.
January 2, 2018
A good poem makes you want more. When I first read Li-Young Lee's striking poem, "Praise Them," and then read it again, and then again, it led me straight to the bookshelves looking for more. The public acclaim Lee has received elsewhere says more than I need to here about his unusual, unsettling, intimate, mysterious ways of providing access to the memories, dreams and reflections that flow like underground river courses beneath the landscapes of daily life. Book of My Nights foregrounds dream and memory; certain motifs--a mother's voice, bridges, hidden rooms, the shape-shiftings that happen in dreams--thread the poems together in a way that makes the collection a single journey through deep interior spaces into which we are invited, but with no guarantee that we will find what we expect or look for. Some part of what the poems impart always remains in shadow, as if they both beckon us and hold us at bay, insisting on the ultimate mystery and privacy of the speaker's journey, insisting that the purpose of his journey is to incite us to return to our own with deepened attentiveness. "Listening is the ground / before my sleep, / where decision is born," he writes, and I hear behind that line and many others in these poems a kindly imperative: "Listen!"
January 25, 2020
I've grown very very fond of his poetry. Every single poem felt like a rosary to be read before bed. Full of profound feelings that sometimes I wonder how it's possible for one to write that way and be real, so haunting, so beautiful, so evocative. A wonderful and very intimate collection.
Night Mirror
Li-Young, don't feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
And don't be afraid
when, eyes closed, you look inside you
and find night is both
the silence tolling after stars
and the final word
that founds all beginning, find night,
abyss and shuttle,
a finished cloth
frayed by the years, then gathered
in the songs and games
mothers teach their children.
Look again
and find yourself changed
and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.
Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.
And time? Time is the salty wake
of your stunned entrance upon
no name.
Night Mirror
Li-Young, don't feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
And don't be afraid
when, eyes closed, you look inside you
and find night is both
the silence tolling after stars
and the final word
that founds all beginning, find night,
abyss and shuttle,
a finished cloth
frayed by the years, then gathered
in the songs and games
mothers teach their children.
Look again
and find yourself changed
and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.
Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.
And time? Time is the salty wake
of your stunned entrance upon
no name.
January 15, 2022
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
Even my name isn’t my name
except the bees assemble
.
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as (______) approaches.
.
Who needs a heart unless it’s one we share
.
to meet me in the color of hills
.
And if I know her name
I know to say it so softly
.
As though touching her
might make him known to himself,
as though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her,
.
And of all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty.
.
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
Even my name isn’t my name
except the bees assemble
.
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as (______) approaches.
.
Who needs a heart unless it’s one we share
.
to meet me in the color of hills
.
And if I know her name
I know to say it so softly
.
As though touching her
might make him known to himself,
as though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her,
.
And of all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty.
.
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