SOURCE: "Memory's Citizen," in The Nation, October 7, 1991, pp. 416-18.

In the following essay, Greenbaum offers a favorable evaluation of both Rose and The City in Which I Love You.

Sometimes poets seem like the orators at Speakers' Corner—I can see them now, stacking their well-built stanzas like orange crates, stepping to the top with a deep breath and saying what they have to say. Readers, meanwhile, mill about the edges of the literary park, hoping to be caught by a poet's music or gossip, by the telescopic insinuation of worlds or by the expansive description of them. Sometimes a poet's voice distinguishes itself by carrying authority and by addressing a singular authority. That has been my experience reading Li-Young Lee's poems.

Lee's first book, Rose (1986), opens with "Epistle," his letter to the world, as Dickinson called her poems. It ends:

 Before it all gets wiped away, let...