Bare skin stretches and rests underneath scant garments in The Undressing, Li-Young Lee’s latest collection of poems. With clothes heaped at the foot of the bed, the book’s title gestures toward the first and second skins Lee has so often plumbed in previous collections like Rose and The City in Which I Loved You. These skins are the difference between what occurs publicly and privately. They’re the difference between the backyard of a home and its bedrooms. For Lee, both can be equally erotic. Yet the backyard cannot exist without the intimacy of the bedroom. The relationship between the lover and the beloved in these spaces is the central tension around which his text orients itself. The book’s dedication makes this clear, since it’s written “For The Lovers / And The Manifold Beloved.” The presence of God underlies all of the book’s action. The God presented is both a witness, as well as one of the highest expressions of love. We readers search with Lee’s speakers, delighting in revelations that are holy and intimate to the gentle touch of our eyes.
The manner of love vaunted in Lee’s poems isn’t one of mere pleasure. It’s far more complicated and Lee is a better poet than that. In the long title poem, which is the first poem in the collection, the speaker (or lover) seduces the beloved. Their conversation is at once physical and metaphysical. It plays out between their bodies but it’s also their essences, or spirits, that speak. In the stanzas that follow, the speaker makes demands of the beloved, and she reciprocates equally, but differently:
I want to hear you utter
the sharpest little cries of tortured bliss, I say,
like a slapped whelp spurt
exquisite gasps of delighted pleasure.But true lovers know, she says,
hunger vacant of love is a confusion,
spoiling and squandering
such fruit…Everything else is gossip, guessing
at love’s taste.
The speaker undresses, kisses, and touches the beloved, and she retorts in kind with a knowledge that is beyond the simple realm of carnality. Their hunger for each other is very much mutual, but the form allows Lee to explore the limits and boundaries of Eros and how it relates to deeper intimacy. Sex isn’t enough to know the taste of love. The taste isn’t specified as being sweet, sour, or even salty—all familiar connotations. We’re left curious at the entire breadth of love’s complexities and challenges. On different days it might taste differently. Anything less than such complexity might as well be fodder for the supermarket checkout line. Lee contends that such gossip is shallow, even sordid and unworthy of love’s touch and the time it takes to grasp and therefore know someone else. In The Undressing, knowledge implies intimacy and understanding.
Near the end the title poem, it shifts towards a macro perspective of love within the context of the world. The beloved insists:
…it’s too late for flags.
It’s too late
for presidents. It’s too late
for movie stars and the profit economy.
It’s too late for plutonomy and precariate.
The war is on.
If love doesn’t prevail,
who wants to live in this world?
Are you listening?
This is the second to last stanza of the fourteen-page poem. It serves as a repudiation of the world’s politics while reifying the bond between the speaker and the beloved. The beloved repeats the last line of the stanza throughout the poem while responding to the speaker’s amorous advances. The tone of the line changes: “Are you listening?” It’s a command and a plea. “Are you listening?” It’s angry and resigned. Lee’s war is a surprising one. It’s a battle between those who are able to love and those who can’t, or won’t. It forces us to consider the interdependence of politics and love. This is a logical end for Lee’s poetic priorities and concerns. Furthermore, the repetition of it being “too late” adds to the urgency of the lines and raises the poem’s stakes to a fever pitch, embodying the eventuality of the war he references. It’s also an excellent example of the way Lee’s poems don’t demand our attention. Instead, he coaxes it from us with elegant lines and conceits.
The longer poems in the collection bookend the text and help frame its ideas regarding God and love—the holy, the erotic, and intimacy. Between these longer poems are two sections of (mostly) shorter pieces. While Lee embraces the longer form, I find him to be at his most effective when writing in a shorter, lyric mode. In lesser hands, many of these poems would come off as sentimental trinkets, but that’s certainly not the case with Lee. His wisdom situates itself in a fresh way. It’s never precious. For instance, in the poem “I Loved You Before I Was Born,” he writes: “I loved you before I was born. / It doesn’t make sense, I know.” But it doesn’t have to make sense when the idea is backed up by the logic he goes on to employ:
Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse
of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes.
And I’ve been lonely for you from that instant.
That loneliness appeared on earth as this body.
I read these four lines innumerable times. I read this poem over and over, and it grew that much more impressive with each successive reading. The timelessness of the relationship between the lover and the beloved is solidified in the lines. It’s proof of a love that’s beyond temporality. The most arresting idea in the poem is that the speaker’s very existence is due to their loneliness for the beloved. They would never have been born otherwise. What logic. I wish more poems had the guts to risk such sentimentality. Lee concludes the poem powerfully, writing “In longing, I am most myself… / I give you my blank heart. / Please write on it / what you wish.” After the complexity of the poem’s logic, the plain vulnerability of this ending is refreshing because of the contrast between the two.
In “Folding a Five-Cornered Star So the Corners Meet” divisions between the speaker and God dissolve into numerous selves, or versions of a self—all unknowable. The poem is at least partially a prayer. It begins as follows: “This sadness I feel tonight is not my sadness.” This line immediately puts the identity of the speaker into question. It goes on, “For so many years, I answered to a name, / and I can’t say who answered. / Mister Know Nothing? Brother Inconsolable? / Sister Every Secret? Anybody? Somebody?” These lines stress the interdependence of all things, hearkening back to the end of the long title poem I discussed earlier in the review. But there’s unity as well as nothingness to consider:
Someone, Anyone, No One, me, and Someone Else.
Five in a bed, and none of us can sleep.
Five in one body, begotten, not made.
And the sorrow we bear together is none of ours.
Maybe it’s Yours, God.
For living so near to Your creatures.
For suffering so many incarnations unknown to Yourself.
For remaining strange to lovers and friends,
and then outliving them and all of their names for You.
It’s notable and important that the body is represented as a multitudinous entity. Only the “me” has a true identity. The other four selves are negations of a self. They’re foreign. The speaker addresses God, giving God very human characteristics. It seems like the concerns of the speaker are being conflated with those of God. It also seems like both are ineffable in the poem due to the complexity of their interconnectedness.
But maybe that’s just human: the desire to know and be known, see and be seen—these are huge concerns that Lee explores in the poem. They relate strongly to the relationship between the lover and the beloved, “begotten, not made.” This distinction is important since it highlights the humanity of the speaker compared to God. The speaker has been born rather than created by God, although they mirror one another in many ways, like a hand might match another hand when measured, or a paper star when folded—the ends nearly meet.
Li-Young Lee is a poet who addresses our highest and lowest impulses, finding love and connection in all of experience. He revels in imperfection and readily acknowledges the limits of his speakers while possessing the vision to push his poems in the direction of unity. In “Love Succeeding” he writes: “All my memories are precious / to no one but myself. / My feelings are holy / to no one but myself.” I could write so much more about The Undressing and cite lines and stanzas that are stunning in their beauty and originality, but I think it’s better to end this review with Lee’s words rather than mine. “Sandalwood” follows a very long poem to end the collection. The speaker describes the process of burning incense and stresses the reciprocity of the lover and beloved one final time:
I keep turning your eyes over
to find your thoughts.
Turning your voice over
to find your meaning.
Turning your body over to find
a place to hide.And you keep turning inside me.
***
Photograph of Li-Young Lee © Donna L. Lee.
