Notes from the Divided Country: Amazon.ca: Suji Kwock Kim: Books

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From Booklist

The four parts of Kim's impressive first collection contain poems of family, history, love, and vision, respectively. The first part is punch-in-the-guts powerful. After opening with the spiritually virtuosic "Generations," tracing the poet's journey from before conception to implantation in the womb, the poems lay out a painful familial scenario, the soul-searing climax of which comes in "ST RAGE," in which sadistic white boys torture the poet's handicapped brother. Anguish also pervades the second section's preoccupation with the half-century of horror Kim's ancestral homeland, Korea, endured, first under Japanese occupation, then in the Korean War; members of Kim's family played historic roles then, and they figure as actors and dedicatees here. The third section's poems on love are analytic, personal, and sensual, though seldom all at once; whereas pain predominated in the first two sections, emotional intensity preoccupies these poems. In the last section, Kim applies that intensity to observation of art and nature, so strikingly that, for instance, having read "On Sparrows," you may never regard those common birds as commonplace again. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Customer Reviews

17 Reviews

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3.8 out of 5 stars (17 customer reviews)

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1.0 out of 5 stars Well-polished, but insignificant poems, May 21 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Notes from the Divided Country: Poems (Paperback)

Ms. Kim writes with appealing fluidity and natural intelligence. Some poems are no doubt elegant displays of her erudition and, for the most part, she has a good ear and a strong sense of the line. However, the content is shallow and ornamental, and it's impossible not to notice the egotism beneath the conceits. Not only does Ms. Kim position her conception and birth as the point of all creation, she casts herself as the voice of Korea (its history, its people, its American dislocation). She is the voice of all suffering and her forced tone of wisdom is rife with cheap cliches. What she ultimately achieves in this book is a fulfillment of almost every Asian stereotype. As hard it as she tries to stir the reader with descriptions so overwrought and violent that they might appear truthful or authentic, the most stirring--and shocking--aspect of this collection is how ruthlessly the poet exploits the Asian diaspora.

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5.0 out of 5 stars GRIFFIN INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE, JUDGES' CITATION, May 18 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Notes from the Divided Country: Poems (Paperback)

Suji Kwock Kim's title NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY refers not only to the Koreas North and South and to all the Americas, but also to the countries of the mind. Travelling between past and present, Kim's powerful fictive imagination creates almost unbearably realistic enactments of war-zones once inhabited by her parents, grandparents, and even her great-grandparents. If "death is no remedy for having been born," as she says in "The Tree of Knowledge," then perhaps poetry is: poetry as expiation, history, memory treasure trove. In highly sophisticated verse, with lines long and lean or short and subtle, an exorcism seems to take place through the precision and music of her language. In poems about the couple next door in San Francisco, or the poet on the road to Skye in Scotland, or in the streets of Seoul on the Buddha's birthday, Suji Kwock Kim celebrates being alive and well in the complexities of the present moment. (Griffin International Poetry Prize, Judges' Citation)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A beauty, from SHENANDOAH (Part 2), Mar 21 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Notes from the Divided Country: Poems (Paperback)

In the shadow of such resilience, daily endurance is worth celebration, as Kim demonstrates when she builds subsequent poems out of and finds music in the junk of ordinary American life. In "Fugue for Eye and Vanishing Point," she wants to see "things that are plainly themselves," things like "Bleach-fumes. Urine. Cement./ Bus-exhaust," but she can't hold her vision to just those things and imagines something beyond, ending the poem with an "Infinite engine trapped in skin." One infinite engine must be the imagination, working through love of language as in "Prelude for Grains of Sand," when she makes the language crackle through "bladderwrack,/ where beds of mussels clack,/ where barnacles and wentletrap crack the green hooks,/ where cockle and quahog drift through dulse" on the shore where she addresses her "angel of unknowing, angel of nothing," who, she writes, "sang me beyond song." That sense of beyond-ness drives poems like "On Sparrows," in which she hears the disembodied voices of sparrows singing from "the dump guttered with toxins and tar" and builds from those sounds a series of accumulating metaphors.

Her attention to things external parallels her frequent use of personae. With those voices, Kim avoids the fashionable self-indulgence of overly intimate confessionalism. In "Monologue for an Onion," the onion speaks: "Taste what you hold in your hands: onion-juice,/ Yellow peels, my stinging shreds." At the same time as she tastes the world she can hold, she also pushes through it, as she directs herself in the epigraph to "The Tree of Knowledge," borrowing from Marilynne Robinson: "Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation." Kim loves facts and things both for what they are for what they are not, so that a desire to reach further into experience constantly pushes past the observation of life's possible bitterness and inevitable dissolution; for her, as for her neighbors constantly keeping up their home and garden in "The Couple Next Door," we find "each chore undone/ before they know it," yet she keeps at her chores and sometimes the imagination trumps that perpetual dissolution.

The last poem, "The Korean Community Garden in Queens" [is] a fine culmination of Kim's concerns; like the plants in that garden, she "wrings crumbs of rot/ for water." She yearns for a way to accept her transience, desiring to learn "How not to mind the end/ we'll come to." She helps readers not mind by
confronting the terrors of dissolution and creating, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the ability to "see life and paradise as one." Her comment on the garden echoes my own sentiment toward her poems: "I love how nothing in these furrow grows unsnarled,/ nothing stays unscathed." She does what more contemporary art should --- fends off the inevitable to offer moments of beauty in the midst of the world's junk, thus redeeming those moments and even the junk itself. (Robert Grotjohn, SHENANDOAH Winter 2003)

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best poetry books of the year
This book is beautiful. I heard the author on NPR, reading poems and giving an interview --- and she took my breath away. Read more

Published on Feb 28 2004

2.0 out of 5 stars Overrated...
This book is drastically overrated. The poet seems to have secured a position in Asian American poetry and there are some redeeming poems in this book such as Monologue for an... Read more

Published on Jan 26 2004