Book of My Nights

Li-Young Lee

Every time I find myself ready to crown a single person the foremost voice in American poetry (the candidate at present being Charles Simic), a book comes along by some other author I've forgotten who relegates the candidate to a shortlist. He undermining principle today is Li-Young Lee's Book of My Nights. I'd read The City in Which I Love You some years ago, thought it wonderful, and then promptly forgotten about Lee, who is of that school of poets who releases a book every seven or eight years. This is his most recent, and it is fantastic.

The subgenre of poetry best classified as “zen koan poems” has been greatly denigrated in Western literature, thanks in no small part to a bunch of bad amateurs in the fifties and sixties whose work persists in the public memory to this day. (I'm sure I don't need to name names. It's that impenetrable merde you came across in various literary magazines and the like that made you think “what on earth is this person on about?”) The zen koan makes you think, not dismiss. Li-Young Lee seems to have taken the unenviable task upon himself to return the poetic version of the zen koan to the literary heights which it by rights should hold, and in The Book of My Nights, he takes great steps toward that goal.

Centering, as one would surmise from the title, around such topics as dreams and insomnia, Book of My Nights showcases Lee's considerable prowess with putting together strings of words aimed at making the reader contemplate some question that has no definitive answer; either it is unanswerable or every person will have his own different answer to the question.

“When he returns to the tale,
the page is dark,

and the leaves at the window have been traveling
beside his silent reading
as long as he can remember.

Where is his father?
When will his mother be home?

How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?”
(from “Degrees of Blue”)

Lee's book-length poetic output may be small (Book of My Nights is his third book of poems), but it is wonderful for all that. Lee is a great American poet, and deserves an audience as such.