Customer Reviews

Notes from the Divided Country

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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)

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)

This book is beautiful. I heard the author on NPR, reading poems and giving an interview --- and she took my breath away. Her actual, physical voice is mesmerizing: musical, gorgeous, full of feeling and song. Her metaphorical "voice" is even better: the language precise and powerful, the imagery unforgettable and haunting, and the overall vision of her poems fierce and unflinching. I was especially impressed by how intelligent she was about the representation of historical events, the influence of Brecht on her work, the slippages of translation and bilingualism.

Most of all, she made me reflect on the consequences of culture being passed from generation to generation --- or not --- and the narrow scope through which we Americans often live our lives. She's the real thing.

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 Onion. However, when the poet writes about politics, she fails and her language moves into the cliche. Political poetry is difficult to write, for anyone. The book has gotten a lot of press and publicity, however, it is really not that strong. Just because the work is about Korea, doesn't mean that it is automatically good. Just because the poet is an ethnic poet, doesn't mean that the poet is good. Check out other work by other poets that are much better--Rick Barot, Amy Quan Barry, Paisely Rekdal...skip this one, even if it is overly hyped and promoted, or just borrow it from the library and return it.

It's a mystery to me as to why this book is so lauded. The language and sentiment are so trite -- haven't I read this kind of disappointing work in a hundred other poetry books deemed "four stars" by the unimaginative mainstream?

This book is outstandingly beautiful. I read the first poem, then the second and the third, until it was midnight and I had finished the whole thing. I couldn't put it down. It's full of gorgeous, heartbreaking, brave, unflinching work. Few poets, especially first-book poets, are capable of writing as sonorously and rhythmically as she does. And the powerful music in her work is married to intellectual questioning. Some of my favorite lines, although they won't make much sense out of context, will give you a flavor:

"Once I was nothing: once we were one.

In the unborn world we heard the years hurtling past,
whirring like gears in a giant factory --- time time time---"

"Bittersweet the wine of one flesh they drank and drank."

"I didn't know who or what I was, only that I was,
each question answered by the echo of my voice alone: I, I, I."

"What was it I saw
in your gaze, the maze

of you: corridors of years, corridors of war, black wheat-hair ripening ---
the last shape sown in closing eyes."

"I wish you could see what I see
when I look at you . . .
murmur of umber, bloodwings beating in bone."

"I hear spume soaking a bowsprit crisped with salt. . ."

"Play on a streel of eelgrass plucked from the troughs of the sea."

I heard the author read recently at Brazos, although I read the book beforehand. There is such love, longing and sadness mixed with spirituality in her work that I expected someone more melancholy. Instead, I was surprised to meet an exuberant, charming, funny woman. What a delight to hear her! Her new work is even better. She's a poet of immense gifts, and I can't wait for her next book.

(A footnote: the envy and rage of some Amazon reviewers is shocking. If you don't like a book, don't get angry at the many, many people who love it. We are not "fat white people with bourgeois fanny packs of ugliness.")

The apparent success of this book isn't dumbfounding, just dumb. I believe that there are people who turn to poetry like this to feel as if they are sensitive, engaged, softly aware of the weight of history, liberal-hearted, kind. With that in mind, it doesn't really matter how poorly or well the book is written, provided that it touches here and there upon topics that excite that special feeling, drops the dazzling ethnic reference, chops the scallion, gets gingery in the threatened kitchen. There is nothing wrong with that, provided that it be seen for what it is. If you make no special demands on poetry, if you are one of the many unimaginative indolent readers from Cambridge to California who want to read the verses indistinguishable from diary and journalism, here is the book for you. Reading it, you will think you are a better person, and you probably should be. You will be unguilted of your bourgeois fanny packs of ugliness. But this is not great poetry by any stretch: skimpy, sloppy, trite. Simplistic. Something you could put together in a month. It's easy to imagine poets of a more valiant variety getting all worked up over the enthusiasm fat white people attach to this dump. If I were a poet, I'd be angry too. As it is, I can sit back in sad wonder as we pave over the site where language's most amazing feats could be taking place. This book is sort of beatifully produced, but it is a parking lot. It is an SUV. You will pay for it.

This is one of the most riveting and brilliant books of poetry I've read this year, and I look forward to many more. It's a first book, so of course it's uneven. Some of the poems feel overwrought and in need of editing. Some of the poems could have been dropped. But overall, I'm deeply moved and impressed, not only by the difficulty and sheer range of subject matter, but also by the musicality and beauty of the voice. (Ferocity and delicacy, as Frank Bidart puts it on the back of the book.) The strongest pieces are extremely strong. Maybe it's just taste, but I have to disagree with some of the other reviewers. In my opinion, this book tackles hard questions with great courage and restraint (not always, but most of the time):

Borderlands

Crush my eyes, bitter grapes:
wring out the wine of seeing.

We tried to escape across the frozen Yalu, to Ch'ientao or Harbin.
I saw the Japanese soldiers shoot:

I saw men and women from our village blown to hieroglyphs of viscera,
engraving nothing.

River of never.
River the opposite of Lethe, the opposite of forgetting,

dividing those who lived from those who were killed:
why did I survive?

I wondered at each body with its separate skin, its separate suffering.
My childhood friend lay on the boot-blackened ice:

I touched his face with disbelief,
I tried to hold his hand but he snatched it away, as if he were ashamed of dying,

eye grown large with everything it saw, everyone who disappeared:
pupil of suffering.

Lonely O, blank of an eye
rolled back into its socket,

I was afraid to see you:
last thoughts, last dreams crawling through his skull like worms.

____________________

By the way, I've noticed some things about this whole online review business. My two cents:

First of all, I don't understand why people fixate on an author's bio, pro or con. It's irrelevant. A book is a book.

Second, I've read lots of books by white authors who write about family members who've survived the Holocaust, WWII, and so on, in far more gruesome detail. But no one cares whether a white author's present-day life is "privileged" or not. Are authors of color supposed to live in the ghetto? It's a double standard, and it's weird.

Last, if we were great writers ourselves, I suspect we wouldn't be wasting our time scribbling these things . . .

For me, this is a worthwhile (mostly good) book that happens to have a lot of flaws. That it is maudlin in parts (a fact that can't be dismissed so easily as rhyming maudlin with shmaudlin), seems obvious to me. Kim sometimes tries too hard to eke out the last ounce of pity from a reader for her relatives (who have suffered things, we can assume as we read her privileged resume, that she has only heard about at the dinner table) but the poems are also heartfelt, careful and obviously more interested in communicating than dazzling with a bunch of worthless postmodern hocus-pocus. But who says a first book has to be perfect? I reccomend this flawed and sometimes wonderful book.