From Blossoms

"Eating Alone" by Li-Young Lee (1984)

The first of a series of poems that deal with eating in Rose (1984), “Eating Alone” explores similar concerns with mortality while focusing them on the death of the speaker’s father. The poem addresses both the production and the consumption of food, describing the speaker’s work in the garden, and the recollections of his recently deceased father this occasions. Full of naturalistic details, “Eating Alone” provides a good example of the ways Lee uses simple, everyday images to stage existential, almost mystical reflections on elemental features of human experience like identity, memory, and death.

"Eating Together" by Li-Young Lee (1984)

Another in a series of poems centered around the motif of eating, this short lyric presents a brief vignette of the speaker gathering with family members to eat a lunch of trout and vegetables. The communal act of dining together prompts the speaker’s memories of how his father ate, which in turn evokes further memories of his father’s personal history and its connection to the speaker’s cultural background. The recurrence of such themes and motifs in “Eating Together” helps contextualize the association between eating, memory, and cultural identity in “From Blossoms.