Verse chronicle December 2002
The real language of men
Reviews of Book of My Nights, by Li-Young Lee; Now the Green Blade Rises, by Elizabeth Spires; Source, by Mark Doty; Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, by B. H. Fairchild; The Nerve, by Glyn Maxwell; Moy Sand and Gravel, by Paul Muldoon.
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,
...
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