[In the following excerpt, Muske comments on the various literary traditions that inform The City in Which I Love You.]

The 1990 Lamont Selection is The City in Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee, who was born in Jakarta. In the 1950's, his father was a political prisoner for a time. The family fled Indonesia and Mr. Lee traveled through Hong Kong, Macau and Japan before coming to the United States when the poet was a child. His poems are explosive and earthy, and in “The City in Which I Love You” he has come into his own:

He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
amused all afternoon
in the Hon Kee Grocery,
amid hanging meats he
chops: roast pork cut
from a hog hung
by the nose and shoulders.
her entire skin burnt
crisp, flesh I know
to be sweet,
her shining
face grinning
up at ducks
dangling single file,
each pierced by black
hooks through breast, bill … I step to the counter,
          recite,
and he, without even slightly
varying the rhythm of his current confession or harangue,
scribbles my order on a greasy receipt,
and chops it up quick.

Like a pairing of Walt Whitman with the great Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu, Li-Young Lee emerges as an audacious and passionate poet-traveler. In the manner of Tang poetry, he speaks colloquially but metaphysically; he meditates, but always allows the noises of the world to enter. He is best when he courts understatement (for at times the Whitman influence seems too heavy-handed for his fine perceptions):

What I thought were the arms
aching cleave, were the knees trembling leave.
What I thought were the muscles
insisting resist, persist, exist,
were the pores
hissing mist and waste.
What I thought was the body humming reside, re-
          side,
was the body sighing revise, revise

Not bad advice. Still, if Mr. Lee's sins are those of excess, they are almost always forgivable in the ambitious context of his book. He takes chances many others in our timid, cool, self-conscious age would not:

That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain ringing like teeth into the beggar's tin,
or two men jachaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you. …

The chugging, rugged roll is topped by a surreal density of image and an odd contrapuntal music that speaks, at times, of an influence beyond Whitman and the Bible—Hart Crane clearly had a hand in some of this sculpting.

In his desire to find the immigrant soul and sense of identity (one of the recurring themes of this book) Mr. Lee ransacks many literary traditions. The result is an odd variety, an astonishing emotional virtuosity:

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.