SOURCE: Smock, Frederick. “So Close to the Bone.” American Book Review 10, no. 1 (March-April 1988): 7, 14.

In the following review, Smock analyzes the style of Rose.

The first poem by Li-Young Lee I ever read, in The American Poetry Review, was called “The Gift,” about a father cutting a metal splinter from his son's hand—how the father told a story throughout so the boy would watch him and not the blade. How the father's tenderness so impressed the boy that, when it was over, he “did what a child does / when he's given something to keep. / I kissed my father.” And how the boy, now grown up, is bending over a splinter in his wife's hand and (presumably) distracting her with this story about his father.

The poem never really left me. Since that time I have been alert to Lee's poems wherever they might appear, and I have appreciated...