The Undressing

The Undressing examines the physical, bodily relationship with the spiritual relationship between two lovers. There are elements of the political—the strongest portions of the book—and of the foreign. Li-Young Lee’s collection is philosophical, not exactly accessible for a first-time poetry reader, but one that with re-readings gathers depth and meaning each time.

The Undressing examines the physical, bodily relationship with the spiritual relationship between two lovers. There are elements of the political—the strongest portions of the book—and of the foreign. Li-Young Lee’s collection is philosophical, not exactly accessible for a first-time poetry reader, but one that with re-readings gathers depth and meaning each time.

The book opens with a long poem about a lover undressing a woman. The winding poem philosophizes, gives details on their love-making, and reaches for a larger, political meaning that the book further explores.

The love poems dominate the first half of the book. Some are less surprising than the opening love poem—“I loved you before I was born. / It doesn’t make sense, I know” is reminiscent of pop-music lyrics. It is followed, however, by “Adore” that, despite its perfume company title, surprised me in several stanzas. It is here we start to see Lee weaving in the foreign as he describes his lovers pose in sleeping to look as if she is:

Calling

because there are no bells
to strike the hours where we live. And I must know
when to kneel and when to rise.
What to praise and what to curse.

That is true wherever one may live. In this poem, Lee also interrupts and corrects himself, which is fitting with the musing, philosophical tone of the book as a whole: “call it the fundamental / paradise . . . did I say paradise? / I meant paradox . . . .”

One of the most riveting poem of this collection is “Our Secret Share,” a long poem in sequence. It begins with a run through history, various political figures claiming the value of people dying for freedom (“Kill them all! / Let God sort out His own!”). The second section shares a dream about the speaker’s sister, suspended in this netherworld in a boat on a river, between two shores, in their moment of childhood innocence before the country is torn with war. Lee’s use of detail here slows the moment down, focusing in on the little girl and her ominous, slow approach to the moments of horror. In the third section, poignant especially in today’s political climate in America, he writes:

My childhood is two facing pages
in The Book of Childhood.

Open, the left-hand page begins:
They hated us without a cause.

Section 5, a prose poem, is the most moving section of the book. It tells the story, from his brother’s voice, of a time when the revolution is going on and he sees schoolchildren attacking and murdering an elderly woman. Startled by the violence, the brother falls out of a building and rolls down a hill where the children can’t reach him, which in turn saves his life. This story illustrates the horrors of the war, the complete lack of respect for human life or for elders. The children could also be representative of the new doing away with the old, not respecting heritage of forefathers, but violently ridding oneself of it. The young in the poem work together as a pack, senselessly destroying and laughing, while the brother remains outside of this force, helpless and exposed (his pants literally fall down in his descent), and ultimately a survivor that lives to tell his story, just as Lee retells the story again in poetry.

The Undressing refers not only to the literal, romantic undressing occurring in the beginning of the poem but in the revealing, vulnerable nature of the poems on God, political unrest, and the life of a survivor.