Of Things Past

Family, exile, ethnic violence: all have dominated American poet Li-Young Lee’s quietly probing, impressionistic poetry since the publication of his first and widely acclaimed volume, Rose, in 1986. Lee’s maternal great-grandfather, the would-be dictator Yuan Shikai, was the first President of the Republic of China, while the poet’s father briefly served as Mao’s personal physician. The family fled the Chinese civil war for Jakarta — where Lee was born in 1957 — and were forced to move again, in 1959, after his father landed in jail during the course of one of Sukarno’s anti-Chinese pogroms. This gritty past informs almost all of Lee’s work, including a 1995 prose memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, and now his latest collection of poems, Behind My Eyes.

After a few years of wandering in Asia, Lee’s family settled in Pennsylvania in 1964, and his father became a Presbyterian minister. Behind My Eyes is steeped in Lee’s religious upbringing. “I doodled in the church bulletin on Sundays/ while my father offered the twenty-minute Pastor’s Prayer,” he recalls in “Cuckoo on the Witness Stand.” Elsewhere in the poem, he recounts that “I sang in a church choir during one war/ American TV made famous.” Lee also likens his own poetry to “a mission,” but he’s no firebrand proselytizer. His tone throughout this collection is that of the soft-spoken, ecumenical humanist. A mini-aubade in “Become Becoming” likens dawn (“the air’s first gold”) to “that color of Amen.” In the Emersonian “Evening Hieroglyph” he compares flitting birds to “decimals or numerals reconfiguring/ some word which, spoken, might sound the key/ that rights the tumblers in the iron lock/ that keeps the gate dividing me from me.”

But not all of Lee’s work is lovely and meditative, and the safe haven of Pennsylvania did not mean that the family could forget its troubled past. In several topical poems Lee pitilessly documents restive scenes from his stolen childhood, for him not so much a paradise lost as one never had. “A Hymn to Childhood,” addressed either to the reader or to himself in the second person, has soldiers smashing a mother’s china, while “you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment.” The poem “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees” opens with his father being bundled into a truck by either government forces or fearsome freelance thugs. That scene, it must be said, reprises earlier writing. The tendency is a major flaw in Lee’s corpus — if one writes almost exclusively about one’s family history for two decades, repetition is bound to occur, and Lee’s descriptions of chaos and burning villages and countries “twice erased/ once by fire, once by forgetfulness” can often feel flatly formulaic.

For readers whose first encounter with Lee is Behind My Eyes, the echo of previous work is not necessarily a problem, of course. In fact, first-timers will find the collection a beauty. Lee is capable of dystopian quips (“The garden was ruined long before/ we came to make a world of it”) and existentialist shrugs (“Every player eventually dies”) — but it’s the lack of bitterness that makes his best pieces so moving. In “Living with Her” — reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s classic “Dover Beach” — Lee’s wife urges him to come away from the window and simply lie down. Ignorant armies still clash in the night, but the prospect of a quiet moment of shared love, Lee reminds us, is enough reason to keep praising our mutilated world. “Alone in your favorite chair/ with a book you enjoy/ is fine,” he writes at the end of one poem. “But spooning/ is even better.” Even a past as turbulent as Lee’s, it seems, can be wiped away by a hug in the here and now.