SOURCE: Kitchen, Judith. “Speaking Passions.” Georgia Review 42, no. 2 (summer 1988): 407-22.

In the following excerpt, Kitchen describes the themes and style of Rose, examining their relationship to the imagery.

When a poem raises a lump in the throat time after time, it must either be terribly bad or terribly good. In the case of a young Chinese-American poet, Li-Young Lee, there is very little question as to how good these poems [in Rose] are. It's how they are good that is hard to define—a question Gerald Stern tackles, but does not answer, in his introduction to Rose. Stern compares Lee to Keats and Rilke, but I feel he is most like Neruda—the Neruda in love with the sensory experiences of the world, the Neruda of the wide associative leaps that make sense only through feeling. What we have here is a fine lyric voice, singing from the...