Over at The Los Angeles Review of Books, poet Dana Gioia praises Shirley Geok-lin Lim as “a poet of exile and assimilation, loss and recovery, journeys and explorations.” His friendship with the Malaysian-born poet goes back four decades, when they first met in Katonah, NY. During an awkward conversation, he recalls, “Finally, I asked a polite but banal question about her graduate studies in English. Shirley replied that she had worked at Brandeis with J. V. Cunningham. His was not a name to impress most people, but to me, Cunningham was a gold standard. He was the greatest American epigrammatic poet — ever. He was also a formidable scholar, mordant curmudgeon, and semi-recluse. Tell me more, I said. And she did.”
“A year later Shirley sent me her first book, Crossing the Peninsula & Other Poems (1980). Published in Kuala Lumpur by Heinemann Asia in a tiny format, the book gave the impression of slightness. I always worry when reading a book of poems by an acquaintance, Will I like it? Will it be interesting or awful? In Shirley’s case, I was immediately engaged, though I recognized her debut volume was a very unusual collection.”
Why? He explains: “Most first books have a grab bag quality. Young poets want to show all their steps toward creative maturity — different styles, subjects, and stances. Lim’s book did that, too, but with an unusual economy and panache. The poems had ambitious subjects — Adam and Eve, Christ, shopping, divorce, Cezanne — but they were mostly short. They didn’t waste a word. (Surely the terse Prof. Cunningham’s influence at work.) Few young poets show such control, especially mixed with such an appetite for ideas and experience.”
He soon added her poem, “To Li Po,” to a new edition of An Introduction to Poetry, which he co-edited with X. J. Kennedy. “Since then I have hardly published an anthology which did not include one or more of her poems.”
Dana Gioia recalled the words of literary critic Hugh Kenner, who once described American Modernist innovation as a “homemade world” — “unorthodox creativity free from pomp, precedent, and pretension.” Then he added “Shirley’s best poetry has that ‘homemade’ quality. Like Wallace Stevens, she has put a planet on the table, a ‘homemade world’ of her own experience.”
Lim’s In Praise of Limes, will appear in March from Sungold Editions. Meanwhile, read more about her in The Los Angeles Review of Books here.