SOURCE: Nobles, Edward. Review of Rose, by Li-Young Lee. Southern Humanities Review 22, no. 2 (spring 1988): 200-01.

In the following review, Nobles assesses the themes and imagery of Rose.

Winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award, Li-Young Lee's first book, Rose, is an accomplishment and an inspiration. The best poems here are willing to aspire, to be emotional, to risk failure in an attempt to grapple with those large (though too often trivialized) issues: religion, inheritance, love, death, the passage of time.

Love, how the hours accumulate. Uncountable. The trees grow tall, some people walk away and diminish forever. The damp pewter days slip around without warning and we cross over one year and one year. 

The poems are invocations, full of doubts, questionings, hopes, dreams, despairs; they stop, start, weave, sweep outward in great rushes of emotion. The poems work in phrases and coagulations of images. In “Dreaming...