The dreamy, sotto voce poems of Book of My Nights[1] might lure babies to sleep, or butterflies. They’re “simple,” “lyrical,” “honest” —their graces come with little scare quotes attached, not because Li-Young Lee is ironic but because it’s so difficult to believe such sweetness isn’t ironic. A willed naïveté may be no worse than real naïveté, yet innocence isn’t always better than experience. The Babes in the Wood were long ago eaten by bears.
Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
It’s hard to imagine a poet more romantic in these unromantic times, but being romantic isn’t simply a matter of slipping on a Byronic collar and striking a pose. Lee’s language derives not directly from Shelley or Keats, but from the slow degradation of romantic diction through the Georgians down to the trivial byways of sixties surrealism. Lee takes W. S. Merwin’s animist idiom (almost forensic in its study of stones and bones) and pushes it a lot farther (shoves it over a cliff, on occasion). All he’s added are punctuation marks.
The Romantics poured the acid of the personal over the studied impersonal forms of Augustan poetry (you know a real crippled Pope wrote his profoundly frivolous poems, but
