The givens

Wry and unsparing, the radiant poems in Sandra Lim’s The Givens move deftly from the deeply personal to the mythic and world-historical. A master of sensory imagery, Lim offers us all the earthly pleasures and sensations of our daily lives―bread, cake, and meat; body, breath, and song; roses, trees, and stars―turning each moment over as one might turn over a rock to reveal a whole ecosystem. Enlisting these quotidian instants in the service of metaphysical inquiry, The Givens takes the measure of our existence with grandeur and charm: one moment we are struck by awe or darkness, the next we brush it off and move on to another day, another epoch. Everyday moments launch spiritual questions and the subtle truths and surprises within them; to eat and to joke is to think about the meaning of life.

At the center of the book, there is a temperature change, as repressed family legacies rise up to the surface, and personal history opens onto collective history. Here, too, mind and sensation are ensnared as ever, as the roots of personal and historical knowledge are also the sources of pain and ardor. The oscillations between the momentous and the deliberately deflating in these poems are dramatized with great poignancy and tact.

Lim’s deliberate clarity in these poems builds as it strips, deepening the mystery of a dark, inquiring imagination. Terrible and wonderful in their news, the poems in The Givens dazzle in their bold inhabitation of lived and imagined experience.