Volume 24 131
this in the majority of her poems. By skipping back
and forth from the flat diction of factual truth to
lusher figurative language, she unites the worlds of
narrative and lyric: “immigrants driving to power
plants in Jersey, / out of meadowsweet and oil / the
chaff of unlived lives blowing endlessly...”
Form and content meet in this juxtaposition of
dictions, and the use of multiple voices mirrors the
effort to construct multiple perspectives. Kim
seems interested in investigating legions of sub-
jectivities: the immigrant self, the child self, the
victim of war, the lover, the mother, and others.
“I’ve never been one soul,” she writes in a poem
styled after the Korean poet Ko Un.
Kim’s technique of colliding voices enlarges
as the book goes on; in later sections, she alternates
poems of lyric intensity with poems of plain
speech. The latter works particularly well in her
persona pieces, written variously in the voices of
parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
These are arguably the most powerful poems in the
book, as Kim settles her gaze on a century’s worth
of war in Korea to offer witness: “Remember the
coal miners ordered to war in Manchuria /... Re-
member the ‘Comfort Corps’ raped forty times a
day, / the woman screaming who could not scream
because she was on fire.” In these works, she thor-
oughly avoids the temptation of easy redemption,
of easy reconciliation, even when she does employ
metaphor: “At night a sickle glinted in the sky,
sharp and pure. What did it reap? / Summer wind
sang through the corpse-forest.” Summer winds
may blow, and sickle moons may shine, but there
is no quick healing in this damaged landscape.
Notes from a Divided Countryfounders in its
final pages. Perhaps not coincidentally, we find
here the poems most removed from the fields of
war. Kim’s subjects and voices begin to veer out
of control, seeming totally unrelated to one another:
a poem about sparrows (the most formally dis-
junctive piece in the book) is followed by several
cityscapes, which are followed by a Frank O’Hara-
like dream poem.
Kim ends with a poem set in a garden, and its
final lines sound the one wrong note in the collec-
tion: Addressing the growing plants Kim writes,
“May I, and their gardeners in the old world, / who
kill for warring dreams and warring heavens / who
stop at nothing, see life and paradise as one.” Af-
ter a tour through the killing fields and “Comfort
Corps,” a prayer for paradise on earth seems will-
fully naïve. Kim may have chosen to go this route
in the desire to have a happy ending; a happier
ending, stylistically, might have been a poem that
maintained the tonal and emotional convictions of
the rest of the volume.
That said, Kim’s book does represent an
achievement; she manages, almost throughout, to
unite the divided countries of personal experience
and political truth without relying on the easy
bridge of sentimentality.
Source:Amy Schroeder, Review of Notes from a [sic] Di-
vided Country, in Georgia Review, Spring 2004, pp. 198–99.Ray Olson
In the following review, Olson calls Notes
from the Divided Country“impressive” and the
first section “punch-in-the-guts powerful.”The four parts of Kim’s impressive first col-
lection contain poems of family, history, love, and
vision, respectively. The first part is punch-in-the-
guts powerful. After opening with the spiritually
virtuosic “Generations,” tracing the poet’s journey
from before conception to implantation in the
womb, the poems lay out a painful familial sce-
nario, the soul-searing climax of which comes in
“ST RAGE,” in which sadistic white boys torture
the poet’s handicapped brother. Anguish also per-
vades the second section’s preoccupation with the
half-century of horror Kim’s ancestral homeland,
Korea, endured, first under Japanese occupation,
then in the Korean War; members of Kim’s fam-
ily played historic roles then, and they figure as ac-
tors and dedicatees here. The third section’s poems
on love are analytic, personal, and sensual, though
seldom all at once; whereas pain predominated in
the first two sections, emotional intensity preoccu-
pies these poems. In the last section, Kim applies
that intensity to observation of art and nature, so
strikingly that, for instance, having read “On Spar-
rows,” you may never regard those common birds
as commonplace again.
Source:Ray Olson, Review of Notes from the Divided
Country, in Booklist, March 1, 2003, p. 1141.Sue Kwock Kim and
Robert Siegal
In the following radio interview, Kim discusses
her Korean background and how she is able to
channel the greater Korean experience into her
work.[Robert Siegel, host]: This isAll Things Con-
sidered from NPR News. I’m Robert Siegel.
Poet Suji Kwock Kim remembers when her
nursery school teacher told her Korean immigrantMonologue for an Onion