Dedicated to those “Who Wrestle With God,” The Invention of the Darling by Li-Young Lee utilizes familiar language and religious motifs to depict a sprawling yet personal approach to the sacred. Lee, the son of a political exile turned Presbyterian minister, previously penned six celebrated poetry collections, many of which ruminate on memories of family and love with religious undercurrents. In The Invention of the Darling, Lee’s retrospective writing goes further, seemingly recollecting the inception of life itself.
Many poems in this collection position parents as both sign and symbol of the creator. The epic poem “The Herald’s Wand” explores various manifestations of this almighty deity, alluding to the serpents of Norse, Greek and Christian mythologies. Through the voice of a speaker that seems to hover omnisciently, Lee establishes, “Before / the serpent was a serpent / she was my mother” and “Before the serpent was a serpent / he was my father.” Over the course of the poem, these mutable metaphors continue to link parents to God. At its conclusive section, aptly labeled “Axis Mundi,” readers are left with the bones of the Jörmungandr-like serpent at the base of an Yggdrasil-like tree. In Lee’s world, the death of a parent is the death of a god, an apocalypse. The speaker describes the hope, the terror and the devastation of three beings who witnessed the death of the parent-god-serpent before reaching out to the reader with the final lines: “Of those three, which one were you? / Whether or not you remember, you were there.” This is what Lee does so masterfully: balance the grandest revelations of the universe with the gentle touch of personal memory.
While the collection explores love as expressed through grief, it also champions love expressed through awe, intimacy and worship. Countering the image of the earthbound serpent, Lee celebrates the glory of the hummingbird in the ecstatic “O, Hummingbird, Don’t Go,” and the sensual “Met and Unmet.” The ultimate image of the collection is one of hope. At the end of the titular “The Invention of the Darling,” the speaker realizes that “I thought I’d lost my mother. / It was I who was lost. / Here she is, a pure vibration / across two bridges.” This resonating image finds harmony between the many dialectics presented throughout the work: snake and bird, child and parent, ground and sky, earth and heaven, living and dead, the personal and the prophetic.
The Invention of the Darling relishes in the language and structures of religion, sanctifying parent-child relationships to depict the scale of the grief of parental loss.
