SOURCE: A review of Rose, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 63, No 3, Fall 1989, pp. 135-37.

Mitchell names "tenderness " as the most salient quality of Lee's poetry and judges this a shortcoming in Rose.

Rose, Li-Young Lee's first book, begins the career of a promising poet. Lee is one of a rising number of Asian-American writers, though in Rose that background is not an issue. One line refers to someone "exiled from one republic and daily defeated in another." Two other lines recall someone "who was driven from the foreign school-yards / by fists and yelling, who trembled in anger in each retelling." There is a poem, too, about relatives singing and remembering China. But Lee does not dwell on grievances. He recreates, instead, "immedicable woes" (Frost's term) about his love for his father. I don't think Lee set out to write a book about the loss of his father, … but the...