The real language of men. (Verse chronicle).

The dreamy, sotto voce poems of Book of My Nights (1) might lure babies to sleep, or butterflies. They're "simple," "lyrical," "honest"--their graces come with little scare quotes attached, not because Li-Young Lee is ironic but because it's so difficult to believe such sweetness isn't ironic. A willed naivete may be no worse than real naivete, yet innocence isn't always better than experience. The Babes in the Wood were long ago eaten by bears.

 
   Li-Young, don't feel lonely 
   when you look up 
   into great night and find 
   yourself the far face peering 
   hugely out from between 
   a star and a star. All that space 
   the nighthawk plunges through, 
   homing, all that distance beyond embrace, 
   what is it but your own infinity. 

It's hard to imagine a poet more romantic in these unromantic times, but being romantic isn't simply a matter of slipping on a Byronic collar and striking a pose. Lee's language derives not directly from Shelley or Keats, but from the slow degradation of romantic diction through the Georgians down to the trivial byways of sixties surrealism. Lee takes W. S. Merwin's animist idiom (almost forensic in its study of stones and bones) and pushes it a lot farther (shoves it over a cliff, on occasion). All he's added are punctuation marks.

The Romantics poured the acid of the personal over the studied impersonal forms of Augustan poetry (you know a real crippled Pope wrote his profoundly frivolous poems, but they sound as if they were cranked out by a mill wheel). The cool detachment of the Augustans seemed old-fashioned when readers found themselves aroused by the intimacy and privacies of romantic speech. It was the difference between listening to a Sunday sermon--and Pope was the wittiest of preachers--and taking a lover. Wordsworth's "real language of men" has been reborn each generation, and as one diction hardens there has usually been a young Romantic ready with a seductive whisper.

The problem with young Romantics is that sometimes they are themselves seduced by what they've read--they don't want to write a language lived but one long antique, one that worked for earlier Romantics. When Lee moves his counters across the page--night and moon, sleep and the stars, the woman, the dead brother--you don't think you've been spoken to by the trembling voice of wisdom. You think you've been stranded in the middle of The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho.

 
   My eternity shrugs and yawns: Let the stars knit and fold inside their 
   numbered rooms. When night asks who I am I answer, Your own, and am not 
   lonely. 

After such passages (with the grandiosity of a molehill, not a mountain), you need a whiff of smelling salts. There are more poems about God here than in Lee's earlier books, but his real religion requires an airless myth of family--almost no one appears in these poems except blood relations, and they're the vague figures of a psychiatrist's couch, reeking of ancient grief and anger. It's part of that drawing-room claustrophobia that Lee's favorite device is the rhetorical question ("And what's it like?/ Is it a door, and good-bye on either side?/ A window, and eternity on either side?"). When a poet has seventy-five of them in a short book, he's left a lot of questions unanswered.