In this new book, one of a new poetry list from And Other Stories, Death gets to tell its side of the story, to narrate, and offer its opinion to those dead and stuck in a forty-nine day limbo before reincarnation occurs. This is a place of echoes and illusions, of desires, chaos and confusion, surprises, fear and learning.
There are, as our narrator points out and the dead come to realize, things the dead could have done to make both the life just ended and the next one better, for themselves and others, but ultimately there is also a statement about death’s omnipresence in humans:
You are already born inside death.
(‘Already DAY TWENTY EIGHT’)
and of despair and helplessness:
Yourfatherinheaven. Belovedbullshitfather. Heasksforthechild. Atnightthe
snow hiddendeepinheaven fallsflakebyflakesecretly like thewaymummy
takesoffitsownbandages we’reallnakechild whenthe bandagescomeoff
DoIpaint the columnsofthehouseswiththechild’sblood? Thehouseiscrying.
Thehouseistrembling. Yourfatherinheaven. Belovedbullshitfather. This
child. Thischild. (I write. I write like an abductor. This child this child.)
(‘A Crow Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest DAY THIRTY EIGHT’)
When the bandages come off, be they spiritual, religious or emotional, we are all naked. Death knows this, yet is still moved by the upset, recognises in itself a sense of abduction, as they spirit the dead away.
Much of this sequence is elegaic and the whole ‘Autobiography’ was written in response to the children lost in the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster. There is little consolation here, no afterlife or promises for the future. Grief and sorrow seem to remain for those in transition and Death can at times only summarise and explain:
It’s cold, for you’ve come out from a warm body
It’s bright, for you’ve come out from a dark body
It’s lonely, for you’ve lost your shadow
(‘Winter’s Smile DAY NINETEEN’)
Death here is not a spirit guide, nor a shaman accompanying the dead on a journey. Mostly Death is a commentator, often stating the obvious (to the dead not the reader) as it makes poetry out of the slow fading away and emptying out of past lives:
World without a sound. Untouchable, flat world. When death dawns,
world turns into a hard mirror. Faraway world of hope.
(‘A Face DAY FORTY-THREE’)
Now you have completely taken off your face
(‘Moon Mask DAY FORTY-EIGHT’)
By day forty-nine the soul is ready to return to the world. Death offers some final observations and advice, with a litany of things that do not miss and have not missed the one about to be reborn, instructions not to go searching for one’s own body and a final ‘don’t’:
Don’t miss you just because you’re not you and I’m the one who’s really you.
(‘Don’t DAY FORTY-NINE’)
Death has a high opinion of itself yet the long poem ‘Face of Rhythm’, which follows the title sequence, offers a partial rebuttal to its self-proclaimed sovereignty. It is a childlike scream against hurt and suffering, a refusal to be overcome by pain, be that physical or emotional. It is about spiritual anguish and bodily woes, about illness, about being forsaken, about ‘wonder[ing] where my soul hides when I’m sick’ and asking cosmological questions:
I wonder whether the souls of all the people on earth are connected as one.
This is intriguing work, set in rather small type (too small!), by a major South Korean contemporary poet. Its complex allusions and the strange world or after-world it is set in, are wonderfully conjured up in a musical translation by Don Mee Choi, and partially explained and discussed in a brief but illuminating interview with the poet and a ‘Translator’s Note’. It reminds us all that:
Death is something that storms in from the outside. The universe inside is bigger.
(‘Commute DAY ONE’)
Rupert Loydell 23rd June 2025
