From Blossoms

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

"Eating Alone" by Li-Young Lee (1984)

The first of a series of poems that deal with eating in Rose (1984), “Eating Alone” explores similar concerns with mortality while focusing them on the death of the speaker’s father. The poem addresses both the production and the consumption of food, describing the speaker’s work in the garden, and the recollections of his recently deceased father this occasions. Full of naturalistic details, “Eating Alone” provides a good example of the ways Lee uses simple, everyday images to stage existential, almost mystical reflections on elemental features of human experience like identity, memory, and death.

"Eating Together" by Li-Young Lee (1984)

Another in a series of poems centered around the motif of eating, this short lyric presents a brief vignette of the speaker gathering with family members to eat a lunch of trout and vegetables. The communal act of dining together prompts the speaker’s memories of how his father ate, which in turn evokes further memories of his father’s personal history and its connection to the speaker’s cultural background. The recurrence of such themes and motifs in “Eating Together” helps contextualize the association between eating, memory, and cultural identity in “From Blossoms.”

"Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee (1984)

One of Lee’s most famous and anthologized poems from Rose, “Persimmons” similarly deploys an image of fruit to investigate themes of memory and cultural difference. “Persimmons” features a heightened focus on the speaker’s memories of learning to speak the English language. The speaker’s memories in the poem turn on his confusion of the word “persimmon” with “precision” in his childhood English class. Elsewhere in the poem, the persimmon, or “Chinese apple,” becomes the vehicle for the speaker to recall memories of a lover and of his father.

Further Literary Resources

The Winged Seed: A Remembrance by Li-Young Lee (1999)

While technically a prose work, Lee’s memoir is nevertheless poetically, impressionistically written. The work reconstructs Lee’s early childhood, growing up as an immigrant after having fled mainland China to Indonesia and eventually arriving in America. Recounting the Lee family’s persecution under President Sukarno’s government, The Winged Seed describes Lee’s father’s year-and-a-half long jail sentence as a political prisoner, a portion of which was spent in a leper colony. Also explored are the Lee family’s five-year trek through Asia and Lee’s memories of his father’s work as a Presbyterian minister in an all-white congregation in western Pennsylvania.

Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee edited by Earl G. Ingersoll (2006)

This collection of interviews provides an in-depth examination of the poet’s views on culture, history, poetic craft, literary influences, and even metaphysical and religious questions. Spanning over 20 years, Breaking the Alabaster Jar compiles the best dozen interviews of Lee’s career. Included is “A Well with Dark Waters,” Lee’s well-known interview with the journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers.

The Undressing by Li-Young Lee (2020)

Lee’s most recent volume of poetry revisits the poet’s recurrent themes and obsessions: love and desire, memory, cultural heritage, and the fundamental mysteries of human existence. Like previous work, this volume integrates elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition, while also introducing new cultural materials such as the writings of the Taoist sage Lao Tzu and contemporary hip hop.