Behind My Eyes Book

Only a few poems in this collection sing for me like those in LYL's ROSE; still, those few really sing. Mother is figured here, a nice complement to the figured, almost mythic father in ROSE; also LYL mines his immigrant experience here and reaches into his childhood in Indonesia, feeling the loss of it.

In this book are the simple, natural, monosyllabic images I find central to Lee, with those subtle twists, often in the verb, to defamiliarize: "when trees start to ache and green" (84) [I admit that I can't follow, or find true, many of the twists in this collection - maybe on rereading - but I relish the strangeness all the same:]. As in ROSE, he cycles through and focuses on a handful of resonant, multi-faced images: bird, tree, dove, apple, the lover's voice, light ("known lights" and "the ancestor of light" 55). The poems look inward, past-ward, love-ward, toward connection ["The world is all dark, yet a hand finds its way/ to other hands, a mouth its way to another mouth." (37):]; he's always intimate and, I think, always concerned with the nature of being itself, often in ways that I can't quite access though I want to.

As in ROSE (and as in Rilke, a prominent influence on Lee), God is still ripening in these poems: "But wasn't it God who lured the child/ ever higher into the tree with glimpses/ of God's own ripening body?" Lee seems always to be pushing for something more akin to Psalm and Lamentation (like Gerald Stern, as Lee describes in Breaking the Alabaster Jar) and not simply the anecdotal - he goes for the core and primal and ancient (I think of Goethe writing something like We too must write bibles): "now that you're older/ at the beginning of a new century,/ what kept you alive/ all those years keeps you from living." And from 95, a poem whose surface narrative is a boring husband talking in order to put his restless wife asleep; of course what he says is a kind of philosophy, a kind of statement about love and God; here's one stanza: "Then, to surrender any sense of an I/ is to feel our true condition, a You/ before God, and to be seen."

My two favorites: "Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics" and "To Hold"