Li-Young Lee's second collection, The City in Which I Love You, is the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection, and follows his award-winning Rose. Like Jane Kenyon [in Let Evening Come], Lee is a poet of the plain style, but where she holds her poems with a tight, spare rein, Lee writes with a loose, relaxed, open plainness. His work depends very greatly on the charms of character, as does the work of his presiding influence, Gerald Stern. But where Stern is our most powerfully ecstatic poet, whose skill seems to reside in sheer will and exuberant directness (“Today I am letting two old roses stand for everything I believe in”), Lee is more an ironist, a poet of doubleness and wariness (“After all, it was only our / life, our life and its forgetting”). Even in lines that directly pay homage to or borrow from Stern, Lee shows his occasional tendency toward flatness or dissipation:

                              I am letting this room
                              and everything in it
                              stand for my ideas about love
                              and its difficulties.
THIS ROOM AND EVERYTHING IN IT

I have to admit that I admire the desires this book expresses more often than I am able to admire the writing.

The City in Which I Love You is predominantly concerned with two impulses—to document the collisions and possible resolutions of Asian and American culture as enacted by an immigrant population, and to trace that evolution personally through Lee's changing relationship with paternity. The repeated mournings of the loss of the father, I think, also bespeak the grief and dissociation resulting from a loss of Asia:

                                                  I wander
a house I thought I knew;
I walk the halls as if the halls
of that other
mansion, my father's heart. …
While a rose
rattles at my ear, Where
is your father?
And the silent house
booms, Gone. Long gone.

Here in “Furious Versions,” the speaker mourns that “memory revises me”; but he will learn to carry his loss into the future—as story and as the desire to become himself a father. In the first half of the book, this loss of the father is a loss of homeland and a loss or probing of faith—faith both familial and Christian; in the second half, his making of a new home through marriage and fatherhood, and his growing enculturation as an Asian-American, provide the speaker with the means to renew his faith and to restore his past. By “The Cleaving,” the book's finest and final poem, he has learned to embrace severing and doubling as the paradox of his existence:

I thought the soul an airy thing.
I did not know the soul
is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. …
No easy thing, violence.
One of its names? Change. Change
resides in the embrace
of the effaced and the effacer. …

Lee's finest achievement as a poet, in fact, is his persistent blending of cultural politics and personal desire, a doubled subject that seems to me essential to American poetry, given America's admirable but troubled character as a culture comprised largely of immigrants:

                                                                                … this dark
dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one
with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese
I daily face,
this immigrant.

Where Albert Goldbarth [in Popular Culture] can make an art form of the lumpy and inclusive, Lee hasn't yet mastered his craft sufficiently to fully support his large embrace. The importance of his double theme notwithstanding, his poems are too loose and tend to dissipate. Even in his longest poems, Lee typically eschews a narrative stance in behalf of a lyric or meditative one, and therefore seldom provides a sufficient chronological or dramatic intensity to drive what instead tends to become reverie. For instance, again in “Furious Versions,” a poem of seven sections, the very powerful opening sections decay into redundancy and hesitation in the poem's sixth:

It goes on and it goes on,
the ceaseless invention, incessant
constructions and deconstructions
of shadows over black grass,
while, overhead, poplars
rock and nod,
wrestle Yes and No, contend
moon, no moon. …

The problem is that Lee doesn't always muster a powerful enough rhetorical voice to convey his imagery. Further, he prefers a very loose, usually irregular stanza and ragged line, suggesting that material presides over structure. At its best here, this technique is effectively humble, a rhetoric of prose-like informality, a democratic or popular site-of-oration. But Lee allows the open-endedness of his technique to seem like unendedness or helplessness; he gives himself few reasons to close or control a line (or stanza or poem) besides his energy, his breathiness. Too often in The City in Which I Love You, my energy and interest to finish simply deplete before his do.