THE ANTHOLOGIST SINCE 1927 THE LITERARY AND FINE ARTS JOURNAL OF RUTGERS COLLEGE R E V I E W Book of My Nights By Li-Young Lee [2001] BOA Editions 80 pp. $12.95 Review by Erik Kennedy Some of the poems from Li-Young Lee's first collection, Rose, are among my favorites of recent publication, esp. "Eating Alone," which is a serious meditation on both death and gastronomy. The new poems in Book of My Nights, however, are unfortunately mostly un-rememberable and beyond interest, much like Lee's morbid dreams, which remind him of death. It would be uncharitable to say that these poems have any relation to death for an audience, but it's certain that these new poems probably belong better in an autopsy ward than in the hands of a reader. Or perhaps better yet, on the psychoanalyst's couch. The volume largely concerns a sleepless Lee wrestling with the economics of death, with the value of sleep and the value of vigilance, and with the memories and existences of his family and himself. The sufferings of the man with the king's affliction, insomnia, are great, and sleep is both friend, as in a poem like "The Sleepless," and foe, best dispatched by meeting the day, as in the all but inscrutable "The Well." Either asleep or awake, though, he must always deal with death and the dead father (I'm not sure if the two are completely distinct). Lee's father, a personal physician to Mao Zedong and later a fugitive, has always figured strongly in Lee's poems, though never so oddly or awkwardly as here. "Little Round" and "Little Father" are poor efforts, and "Words for Worry," a decent poem, certainly, irritatingly trifurcates the world into fathers, sons, and father-sons, and cloys the intellect with its final sentiment. No poem is so grating, though, as "The Moon from Any Window," a lonely poem that tries to jam the world into one symbol, as though that will fill the emptiness, much as one might try to stuff one's vacation luggage into a hatchback: it resists fitting. A poem that cries "I can see the whole world of suffering in this moon!" can't help but trip over itself. At one point in the volume, Li-Young Lee calls himself, as if a fantasying Jesus, "He-Dreams-for-All-Our-Sakes." It's this dream-slinger attitude that undermines the collection the most. For Lee, the dreaming, or insomniac fancying, that dominates the book is a poetry by proxy (as in "The Sleepless") that, in Lee's transforming hands, aspires to become poetry proper. On occasion it does. Still, the dream-work comes with all the tortures and ecstasies that writing verse does, and few of verse's advantages.