Notes from the Divided Country: Poems

Rating:
Summary: RAVE, RAVE, RAVE
Review: I saw a review of NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY in the Sunday L. A. Times a week ago, and went out & bought it at the L. A. Festival of Books. I loved it! I just bought another 2 copies as gifts for Mother's Day.

I don't normally read poetry, so I'm not very articulate when it comes to technical terms, etc. But let me just say that this book is wonderful, and I loved it.

I'm going to borrow some of the reviewer's words:

"I wish I had space in which to consider at length the important debut of "Notes From the Divided Country" by Suji Kwock Kim. It seems to me that this first book (already acknowledged by the 2002 Walt Whitman Award) deserves close and celebratory attention.

Suji Kwock Kim has written a book of unforgettable poems; she has found a way, through the medium of language, to allow readers into a double consciousness that is, finally, the poet's undivided mind. She writes of the "old country" reborn in the New World, of her ancestors in Korea during the Japanese occupation and her immediate family in America: the Trees of Unknowing and Knowledge. She writes of her mother's death with lamentative, bitter restraint.

In one of the most inspired and brilliant poems, she considers sparrows and their symbology: "How to stay faithful / to earth, how to keep from betraying / its music " she wonders - and brings us full circle here - as she, too writes of the Earth that both divides us and brings us together." (LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW, April 27, 2003)

Rating:
Summary: A knock-out
Review: I was blown away by this book. It isn't easy reading poems about wishing not to have been born, so I don't know how the hell she wrote them. She doesn't pull punches. She isn't afraid to tell unpleasant, sometimes terrifying, truths about one person's perspective on what it means to be human: "Admit it. You hate the body/ because it can be broken,/ stabbed, shot full of holes." "We didn't want to be born we didn't want." "I think of the loneliness of the dying,/ the bodies I saw along the way, rotting separately." "Last thoughts, last dreams crawling through his skull like worms." You don't hear writing like that every day. It fuses intelligence and emotion at the highest level. More importantly, she isn't afraid of strong feeling. The passion in many of her poems is astonishing. Maudlin, schmaudlin. That's the risk you take, if you don't want to write safe, skillful, emotionally bland, cerebral, forgettable work. The risk pays off here. A few poems in the 4th section falter a bit for me, but the rest of the book flies.

Rating:
Summary: Well-polished, but insignificant poems
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: unimaginative indolent readers from Cambridge to California
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Emotional ferocity, from GEORGIA REVIEW
Review: The literal subjects of NOTES FROM A DIVIDED COUNTRY are easily ascertained: warfare, occupation, racial assimilation, family tragedy -- in other words, the scourges of the twentieth century. But Kim attempts to sculpt these events into lyric; her goal is to shape-change trauma into art without losing emotional ferocity . . . By skipping back and forth from the flat diction of factual truth to lusher figurative language, she unites the worlds of narrative and lyric: "immigrants driving to power plants in Jersey,/ out of measowsweet and oil/ the chaff of unlived lives blowing endlessly. . ."

Kim seems interested in investigating legions of subjectivities: the immigrant self, the child self, the victim of war, the lover, the mother, and others. "I've never been one soul," she writes in a poem after the Korean poet Ko Un.

Kim's techniques of colliding voices enlarges as the book goes on; in later sections, she alternates poems of lyric intensity with poems of plain speech. The latter works particularly well in her persona pieces, written variously in the voices of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. These are arguably the most powerful poems in the book, as Kim settles her gaze on a century's worth of war in Korea to offer witness: "remember the coal miners ordered to war in Manchuria/ . . . Remember the "Comfort Corps" raped forty times a day,/ the woman screaming who could not scream because she was on fire." In these works, she thoroughly avoids the temptation of easy redemption, of easy reconciliation, even when she does employ metaphor: "At night a sickle glinted in the sky, sharp and pure. What did it reap?/ Summer wind sang through the corpse- forest." Summer winds may blow, and sickle moons may shine, but there is no quick healing in this damaged landscape. . .

Kim's book does represent an achievement; she manages, almost throughout, to unite the divided countries of personal experience and political truth without relying on the easy bridge of sentimentality. (Amy Schroeder, GEORGIA REVIEW Spring 2004)

Rating:
Summary: Well-polished, but insignificant poems
Review: This book is a must-read for people who are interested in contemporary poetry, especially new voices in contemporary poetry. You can either love it or hate it, but you can't ignore it. In my opinion, it is truly beautiful and passionate and harrowing and brilliant. I love it.

(A note to the previous reader: if Amazon and Barnes & Noble have run out of stock, try Louisiana State University Press directly, or order it through the Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York, at www.aaww.org. It's a nonprofit organization worth supporting.)

Rating:
Summary: One of the best poetry books of the year
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant book (now in its second printing)
Review: 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.")

Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite poetry books this year
Review: 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 . . .