[In the following review, Nobles assesses the themes and imagery of Rose.]

Winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, Li-Young Lee's first book, Rose, is an accomplishment and an inspiration. The best poems here are willing to aspire, to be emotional, to risk failure in an attempt to grapple with those large (though too often trivialized) issues: religion, inheritance, love, death, the passage of time.

Love, how the hours accumulate. Uncountable.
The trees grow tall, some people walk away
and diminish forever.
The damp pewter days slip around without warning
and we cross over one year and one year.

The poems are invocations, full of doubts, questionings, hopes, dreams, despairs; they stop, start, weave, sweep outward in great rushes of emotion. The poems work in phrases and coagulations of images. In “Dreaming of Hair,” the hair weaves the images, building powerfully in emotion as the poem moves from place to place, through time and the imagination.

Ivy ties the cellar door
in autumn, in summer morning glory
wraps the ribs of a mouse.
Love binds me to the one
whose hair I've found in my mouth,
whose sleeping head I kiss,
wondering is it death?
beauty? this dark
star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head.

Lee's poems are intriguing in part because obsessed. As Gerald Stern notes in his introduction to the book, Lee's poems are predominantly a search for the father, a search to understand his relationship to his father and the inheritance his father has left him: his spirit, his family, his struggle. The opening section of the book centers around Lee's spiritual and personal life before the father's death; the closing section concentrates on the son and family after the father's death; and the middle section is a provocative and elegant poem entitled “Always a Rose.”

This central poem of 272 lines addresses the rose as ancient symbol and living spirit. This spiritual relationship allows the speaker transcendence into a state of mind necessary to deal with the father's death and the fragility of the surviving self and family which the death illuminates.

It was I who saw you withered and discarded,
I, who taught my father patience, and dulled the blade of his anger,
who eat you now, before morning,
when you must climb your ladder of thorns and grow to death.
I, middle stone in the row of stones
on my mother's ring. I,
the flawed stone, saw you dying
and revived you.

Lee's poems are not without flawed moments (occasional weak diction or oversimplicity), but the book's accomplishments far outweigh any faults. The poems are ecstatic, but not dogmatic or sweetened with easy solutions. They are tender poems that rise above sentimentality because they ring with authenticity, mystery, and a quiet mastery of language.

A rain has begun.
It is moving toward me all my life.
Perhaps I shall know it.
Perhaps it is my father, arriving
on legs of rain, arriving
this dream, the rain, my father.