Review of Yearn Hong Choi’s Adieu, Winter
I’ve had the chance to read and review Dr. Yearn Hong Choi’s latest book of poetry, Adieu, Winter, published by American Star Books, in Baltimore. Dr. Choi is the only first generation Korean-American poet to publish poetry books in both Korean and English, and has been doing so since he arrived at Indiana University as a foreign student in 1968. He is also the first and only Korean poet to read his poems in the U.S. Library of Congress, which he did in 1994 and 2003, by invitation of the then U.S. poet Laureates. Is there a poet better qualified to capture the pride, gratitude, longing and loneliness of being Korean-American?
Such mixed and sometimes conflicting emotions no doubt arise from the author’s feeling that he is “neither Korean nor American, but trying to be both Korean and American.”
All that said, it is the simplicity and straightforwardness of his poems that haunts and charms me.
They are divided into four groups, each with it’s ownsubtitle: Wayfarer, America, Love Song, and Homeland. Wayfarer is about his travels. The first poem, about Hawaii, begins:
The center of the world is the ocean.
The center of the island is the waves.
In two lines Choi captures Hawaii’s essence, how it exists in people’s hearts and souls. But is he not also evoking the fluidity of his own world, and his attempts to find an anchor?
The second poem is also about Hawaii.
You need a swimsuit
and a surfing board
for a necessary condition of happiness.
Note the word “necessary.” Happiness is not a goal but a necessity. Equipment is involved. Equip yourself and the waves will “turn your body to an acrobat.” In the poet’s mind, one has to be an acrobat to be a first-generation Korean-
American.
The third poem, “Hibiscus Flowers,” describes a young woman who has “grown up with the optimum amount of sunshine…and rain shower.” She is equipped to “ride the rainbow.” We too become equipped and lifted. The poetry becomes our wings.
A flight through Europe is followed by “Sea and the Nations,” an insightful prose poem on Man’s attempts to impose national boundary lines on the seas. Of course, seas do not recognize boundaries, except those imposed by land. Even then, they rebel, reminding us that lines drawn on water are “ridiculous,” even as lines drawn on land are “artificial.” Don’t look for artificial lines in this poem or any of the poems in this book. No sonnets. No clerihews. No haiku. The poet listens with his own ear. The result is a natural, even organic, lyricism, that gives his poems dignity, power, and a sense of mystery, even as they allude again and again to a sense of rootlessness.
In America, he writes of his life as an American,family, first house, baseball, unions, Chevrolet, and, touchingly, in “Poet’s Daughter,” of seawater departing from the clear sea stones his young daughter has given him. He keeps them anyway, because they’re from his daughter.
In America, we also encounter “Korea, Kentucky,”about a town he visits. How did it come by its name? No one can explain the mystery. God offered the name, “as he offered the Ten Commandments to Moses,” Choi supposes. It is this poem, I feel, that conveys most poignantly the poet’s sense of loneliness and dislocation.
And in America, comes the title poem, “Adieu, Winter.” Here Choi evokes a small fox, who leaves it’spoems (paw prints) in the snow. The fox is “an honored guest.” But I think the fox is part of Choi himself, in search of Spring. “Adieu, my fox,” he writes.
Love Song comes on a wave of joy. Each poem is a treasure. I will cite one, entitled simply “Spring.”
The wind proposes dance to the tree
first waltz
then tango.
The world becomes an outdoor dancehall.
What a clear picture we get of the vicissitudes of that season, but also, perhaps, the freedom of spirit the poet yearns for.
Finally, Homeland, the crest of the collection. In “Oh, One Homeland” Choi pens a lament for the division between North and South Korea.
If Mt. Everest separated us,
if the Milky Way separated us,
we would be less painful.
Even I, a tenth generation American, can feel this pain. It’s the pain of family being separated from family and not being allowed to reunite.
And in “Cheju island 2”:
The front yard and the back yard are sea
from anywhere on the island.
The sea being separate, free, belonging to everyone and no one. Like the author. Such strong, stark imagery.
Adieu, Winter concludes with two poems that are songs of gratitude to the American soldiers who sacrificed so much during the Korean War. “The amazing miracle” of South Korea is due to that sacrifice, he asserts, reinforcing the gratitude both Korean and American readers will feel for the light this book sheds on what it’s like to be Korean-American. I’ll go further. Adieu, America is a must read for anyone wishing to better understand what it’s like to be human. We’re all immigrants, in a sense, all exiles looking for our Garden of Eden. Will we find it? Maybe not. But we’re not about to quit trying. Thank you, Yearn Hong Choi,
for encouragement along the way.
By Ed Sadtler
