The Invention of the Darling

The Invention of the Darling, by Li-Young Lee, opens with a poem titled “Love’s Unswerving Gaze,” which begins:

What was told to me in a whisper
I must now repeat
under my breath:

The true lover
lives only
to love the beloved.

Love—for the world, for life, and for what lies beyond human comprehension—is the driving force behind Lee’s poems, which meditate on mortality and on the mysteries of life as they are manifest in nature. The speaker seeks out the sacred in the mundane, expressing wonder and a desire to connect to something greater than the self:

Is it true
you travel back and forth
between the living and the dead
to collect the nectar of both worlds, O,

Master of the Veils, is it true
you say through The One, The Three, and The Many,
and now you do nothing
but feed on God’s best parts?

This ode to the hummingbird reflects on the creature’s origins, its physical attributes––“green glimpse, blue clasp”––and prowess, a speed that defies gravity itself. For the speaker, the hummingbird is close to the divine, having “been to The Promised Land,” which the speaker wants to visit, too:

Show me the way there
over the seven mountains
and through the seven valleys.

Many of the poems in The Invention of the Darling have a reverent stillness to them; others draw on the form of the parable to convey a sense of the revelatory, as the speaker peels back layers of time to recall the distant past:

The instant my mouth first seized
onto my mother’s nipple
and I tasted the warm initial
spurt of its living syllable,

I forgot everything that came before:
Heaven, God’s face, my own face
before I entered time
and began to die, began to feed
upon my mother’s body.

At the center of these poems is the Beloved, here figured as the source of everything:

You are one. And I am one, she says.
Together, we make two.
All the rest are The Ten Thousand Things.