Li-Young Lee Critical Essay | Critical Review by David Baker

Critical Review by David Baker

SOURCE: Baker, David. “Culture, Inclusion, Craft.” Poetry 158, no. 3 (June 1991): 158-75.

In the following excerpt, Baker assesses the representation of the “foreign” or “other” in The City in Which I Love You.

Li-Young Lee's second collection, The City in Which I Love You, is the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection, and follows his award-winning Rose. Like Jane Kenyon [in Let Evening Come], Lee is a poet of the plain style, but where she holds her poems with a tight, spare rein, Lee writes with a loose, relaxed, open plainness. His work depends very greatly on the charms of character, as does the work of his presiding influence, Gerald Stern. But where Stern is our most powerfully ecstatic poet, whose skill seems to reside in sheer will and exuberant directness (“Today I am letting two old roses stand for everything I believe in”), Lee is more an ironist, a poet...
(read more)