For whatever reason, I find it next to impossible to review poetry. I know what I like, but find that my best case I can make for liking it is simply reading it aloud to others. I liked Li-Young Lee's The City In Which I Love You a lot. And the best case I can make for it is this:
Choose a quiet
place, a ruins, a house no more
a house,
under whose stone archway I stood
one day to duck the rain.
The roofless floor, vertical
studs, eight wood columns
supporting nothing,
two staircases careening to nowhere, all
make it seem
a sketch, notes to a house, a three-
dimensional grid negotiating
absences,
an idea
receding into indefinite rain,
or else that idea
emerging, skeletal
against the hammered sky, a
human thing, scoured, seen clean
through from here to an iron heaven.
A place where things
were said and done,
there you can remember
what you need to
remember. Melancholy is useful. Bring yours.
There are no neighbors to wonder
who you are,
what you might be doing
walking there,
stopping now and then
to touch a crumbling brick
or stand in a doorway
framed by the day.
No one has to know you
think of another doorway
that framed the rain or news of war
depending on which way you faced.
You think of sea-roads and earth-roads
you traveled once, and always
in the same direction: away.
You think
of a woman, a favorite
dress, your father's old breasts
the last time you saw him, his breath,
brief, the leaf
you've torn from a vine and which you hold now
to your cheek like a train ticket
or a piece of cloth, a little hand or blade-
it all depends
on the course of your memory.
It's a place
for those who own no place
to correspond to ruins in the soul.
It's mine.
It's all yours.
