Sometimes poets seem like the orators at Speakers' Corner—I can see them now, stacking their well-built stanzas like orange crates, stepping to the top with a deep breath and saying what they have to say. Readers, meanwhile, mill about the edges of the literary park, hoping to be caught by a poet's music or gossip, by the telescopic insinuation of worlds or by the expansive description of them. Sometimes a poet's voice distinguishes itself by carrying authority and by addressing a singular authority. That has been my experience reading Li-Young Lee's poems.

Lee's first book, Rose (1986), opens with "Epistle," his letter to the world, as Dickinson called her poems. It ends:

Before it all gets wiped away, let me say,
there is wisdom in the slender hour
which arrives between two shadows.

It is not heavenly and it is not sweet.
It is accompanied by steady human weeping,
and twin furrows between the brows,
but it is what I know,
and so am able to tell.

Some of the biographical background for this solemn introduction is well known by now. Both Lee's books carry biographical notes (a whole page in The City in Which I Love You) and his interview in Bill Moyers's WNET series The Power of the Word supplied more. Lee was born in 1957, to Chinese parents then living in Jakarta, Indonesia. His father had been Mao's personal physician and then professor of English and philosophy at Gamaliel University in Jakarta. The senior Lee ended up a political prisoner under Indonesia President Sukarno and spent two years in prison before escaping and fleeing the country. A nearly five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macao and Japan led the family to the United States, where Lee's father, "the critical 'myth'" of Lee's work, became a "Presbyterian minister in a tiny western Pennsylvanian town, full of rage and mystery and pity, blind and silent at the end." Lee's father died in 1980.

The above quotations are from Gerald Stern's introduction to Rose. In the late 1970s, Stern was Lee's mentor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Stern's preface to Rose—his introduction of Lee to the literary world—still stands as the most valuable prose about Lee's work. The plainspokenness of Lee's poems is coupled with a fearlessness of direction which Stern calls "a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration." This "willingness," paired with Lee's unorthodox imagery, makes a powerful team. In Rose we hear this brave combo in the last stanza of "Dreaming of Hair":

Lee's task seems sometimes to remember the life of his father for him, to plot the moving figure, the migrant political prisoner whose character kept evolving when the mad dash was over. We often get the sense that Lee feels only one step ahead of the oblivion of inarticulateness (and always a few steps behind his father). Unlike the picture one gets of other poets—Ashbery, for instance, who comes to mind (regardless of his incalculable labors) as being in repose or absently surveying a garden—Lee comes across as a man bent over a drafting table, erasing, rewriting, sweating more than he wishes. In Rose's poem "Mnemonic" he says:

A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes
to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father
would be ashamed of me.
Not because I'm forgetful,
but because there is no order
to my memory, a heap
of details, uncatalogued, illogical.

Rose announces Lee's obsessions but also bears the innate triumph of ordering language. In the poem "Persimmons" Lee takes revenge on the teacher who humiliated him for confusing the fruit's name with the word "precision." And who is more precise than the poet, writing about persimmons that a blind father painted from precise memory? In the poem, the father, when handed his own scroll-painting of persimmons, says:

Oh the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of the one you love,
the texture of persimmons
in your palm, the ripe weight.

Rose won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from New York University and, like its title, offers the reader a complicated, beautiful, burdened, opening blossom. The City in Which I Love You, published four years later, was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1990. In The City, dreaminess and the urgency of ordering memory still seem braided; dream, or the travel between the dead and the living, between truth and the imagination, and between refugee status and citizenship, seems, in fact, to be the vehicle for ordering memory. Blind feeling, or feeling memorized onto the soul, as with the father's painting of persimmons, is still the way to the truthful depiction of life's experiences.

The long opening poem of the volume, "Furious Versions," gives the impression of the poet floating, like a Chagall figure, through the lives of his family, scouting for their stories through a kind of relaxed levitation in liquid time. The poet observes the world's images metamorphosing, like a lava lamp, and tries to metamorphose with them. Aside from the first line's awkward verb—"These days I waken in the used light"—the poem generally feels effortless and effervescent.

Or I might have one more
hour of sleep before my father
comes to take me
to his snowbound church
where I dust the pews and he sets candles
out the color of teeth.

…..

And I wonder
if I imagined those wintry mornings
in a dim nave, since
I'm the only one
who's lived to tell it,
and I confuse
the details; was it my father's skin
which shone like teeth?
Was it his heart that lay snowbound?
But if I waken to a Jailer

…..

what name do I answer to?

There's a fabulous passage in part 5 of the poem, an image that another, more opportunistic poet might have used to wrest an entire poem:

Once, while I walked
with my father, a man
reached out, touched his arm, said, Kuo Yuan?
The way he stared and spoke my father's name
I thought he meant to ask, Are you a dream?
Here was the sadness of ten thousand miles,
of an abandoned house in Nan Jing,
where my father helped a blind man
wash his wife's newly dead body,
then bury it, while bombs
fell, and trees raised
charred arms and burned.
Here was a man who remembered
the sound of another's footfalls
so well as to call to him
after twenty years
on a sidewalk in America.

Once the imagination is receptive, Lee might be saying, you can find anyone.

Perhaps one of his "simpler" poems, but one whose concept and execution I still find wonderful, "This Room and Everything in It," describes another "mnemonic," another formula for memory, as taught by the speaker's father:

I am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about love
and its difficulties.

I'll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance….

…..

and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater idea.
And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I'll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it.

The room is one architecture for memory, the stanza another.

Lee has been compared to Whitman; in fact, Judith Kitchen, writing in The Georgia Review, has said Lee may sound too much like him. The father-of-us-all does stride through the book's last and most challenging poem, "The Cleaving" (which, for all the hoopla, including a Pushcart Prize, doesn't swoop me up). The poem's speaker finds himself—while ordering roast duck at the Chinese grocery—in an epiphanic moment. His relationship to the butcher, to food, to the machinery of the body, and the interrelationship of all these elements, swirl about him and illuminate his relationship to his own soul and the soul of others. A string of images about lovemaking begins, "The noise the body makes / when the body meets / the soul over the soul's ocean and penumbra," and ends, "an engine crossing, / re-crossing salt water, hauling / immigrants and the junk / of the poor." And so the poet gives us something else to remember.