Engaging the Mystical & Worldly: A Review of Li-Young Lee’s The Undressing


Li-Young Lee’s fifth collection, The Undressing, contains exploration of the human condition through the doors of interactions with lovers, family, and personal history. The humility with which Lee contemplates life on large and small scales is ever refreshing, a feat that Lee has mastered in his work over the years. In the forward to his debut collection, Rose, Gerald Stern, whom Lee studied with at the University of Pittsburgh, likened him to Theodore Roethke, John Keats, and Rainer Marie Rilke.

When I began reading The Undressing, I was also reading some poems from Rainer Marie Rilke and had been hanging on a line from the Duino Elegies. The question Rilke posed was “Aren’t lovers always arriving at each other’s boundaries?” As I immersed myself in Lee’s poems, I found his work to be a natural continuation and answer to Rilke. Lee’s delightfully meditative poems are interested in boundaries we have in all of the different roles we inhabit, boundaries we encounter with friends, lovers, family, and self. Most importantly, these poems encourage thoughtful risk that guides toward knowing oneself and making the choice to expand beyond these boundaries, to become more intimate with life.

In the title poem, which spans more than ten of the opening pages, the speaker engages in different types of undressing in response to the prophetic female voice. She insists, “There are things you need reminded of...” and so the learning of listening and interconnectedness begins. In all her oracular splendor:

 

She says: The world
is a story that keeps beginning.
In it, you have lived severally disguised:
bright ash, dark ash, mirror, moon...

 

And as the lines unravel like the unbuttoning of a blouse, the speaker responds, “From where I’ve been sitting beside her/I drop to one knee before her.” The way Lee captures the tenderness of memory and growth is incredible—here is a visual representation of that humility and willingness to move beyond what is initially known. Of course, the genius of Li-Young Lee’s poems is how these qualities are transferred onto the reader. How easy it is in a busy world to get far away from both others and the self. The pure joy at the bottom of these poems is the resulting awareness and acceptance of the body, the gentle returning to oneself with a slightly wiser inner monologue.

Like the enduring humility of Lee’s voice, his commentary on the personal and generational impacts of the refugee experience is ever more important. He dazzles in “Folding a Five-Cornered Star so the Corners Meet” by reveling in this shared experience: “This sadness I feel tonight is not my sadness.” He expands this through the lines “Someone, Anyone, No one, me, and Someone Else./Five in a bed and none of us can sleep.” From the intimate and intense image of five people in one bed, Lee zooms out to give us more room to encounter the bigness of life and the limits of language. Similarly, in “God is Burning,” the speaker confesses:

 

And God’s not alone the way I’m alone,
my whole life merely a commentary on those verses:
You are as close to us as breathing, yet
You are farther than the farthermost star.

 

On the opposite page, God appears in the faces of others and in a lovely display of Lee’s willingness to play with language. “Three Words” contains rampant and interesting uses of capitalization and compounding:

 

God-My-Brother spends most of his time alone.
God-My-Sister is the only one
he’ll ever let touch his face.

God-My-Sister, you should see her.
I have so many brothers,
but forever there will be
only one of her, God-My-Sister.

 

In his fearlessness, Li-Young Lee achieves layered poems that are at once mystical and worldly. In the penultimate poem of the collection, “Changing Places in the Fire,” Lee begins with stanzas outlining the graphic violence of war and murder. But like many of his poems, there is more than one place for us to inhabit:

 

It is the lover and the beloved
constantly changing places in the fire.

And it is the wind in the treetops,
outside our window,
a voice torn to pieces. Hear it?

The wind without a house, she says.
Time without a gate, she says.

A memory of the ocean
torments the trees,
a homesickness, she says.

The wind is leafing through both of our histories,
Looking for a happy ending.

It is my hand moving over your body, I say,
finding more and more to know.

 

With this careful and passionate collection, Lee takes the reader to many places and engages her through earthly elements, reminding her of what the world is and what it could be. Instead of meeting these truths with fear and halt, the sometimes-horror of realizing our reality as well as the infinite possibilities we all have, his mindful approach can help us to settle into such a brightness.

 

 

 

Sam Leon is an MFA candidate in poetry at Florida International University. She is the Assistant Editor for Gulf Stream Magazine, for which she also writes book reviews and conducts author interviews. Sam earned her BA in English Writing from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where she was a two-time recipient of the Carroll Creative Writing Scholarship.