From Blossoms (Bloodaxe World Poets): Selected Poems: 4

by Li - Young Lee (Author)

• New

  International Edition
  2007

  $13.82

  Li-Young Lee is a leading American poet, born in Indonesia, whose poetry fuses memory, family, culture and history to explore love, exile, family and mortality. This selection, drawn from three collections and a memoir, shows Lee searching for understanding and for the right language to give form to what is invisible and evanescent. 'His poems are made from his life with his life; his poems are earned. He dares to be simple. And he is surely among the finest young poets alive' - American Poetry Review . 'Li-Young Lee has been praised for his passionate poetry and its deceptively simple style. His poems are unique in their emotional intensity and metaphysical abstraction, particularly at a time when many contemporary American poets are breaking away from the lyric I in order to articulate an unstable and plural I ...Many of his poems recall his father, who is portrayed as strict and tender, powerful and vulnerable, godlike and human' - Xiaojing Zhou, Heath Anthology of American Literature . Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. His great-grandfather, Yuan Shikai, was China's first republican president (1912-16). His father, Lee Kuo Yuan, a deeply religious Christian physician, was personal secretary to Communist leader Mao Tse-tung. After they fell out, Lee's father escaped to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University, but was later imprisoned for19 months in Sukarno's jails and in a leper colony, before he managed to escape and take his family out of the country. After a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964, where Lee's father became a Presbyterian minister. Assisting his father on preaching trips in Pennsylvania was another of Li-Young Lee's formative experiences.