Kim Hyesoon, _Phantom Pain Wings_, trans. Don Mee Choi

 I WAS READING somewhere recently about South Korea's low fertility rate, which has been <1 for a few years now (replacement level is 2.1). The writer's take was that the education level of South Korean women has risen dramatically in recent generations, but the society's patriarchal culture has scarcely budged, with the consequence that younger South Korean women are intentionally avoiding marriage and motherhood, even boyfriends and sex (you can read up on the "4B movement" in a good many places).

Reading Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian and this collection by Korean poet Kim Hyesoon has made me a well-wisher to the 4B movement. The male entitlement on view in both books induces shudders. HUNTR/X wouldn't stand for it, I'm sure (come to think of it, they don't have boyfriends, do they?).

The collection's (English) title refers to the pain someone who has had (for example) a leg amputated can still experience in the now-absent leg, although the missing limbs in this instance are wings, as though Kim were a bird who had lost her wings. The poems seem to be working out this loss or working towards recovering birdness while at the same time grieving another loss, the deaths of her parents. As Kim writes in the essay that New Directions have appended to this translation, "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language."

Being a bird, for Kim, seems to involve getting up and out, leaving the cage, breaking into a new dimension (that I was also reading Cartarescu's Solenoid as I was reading her poems might have reinforced this theme for me). For instance:

I fly then stop

I fly then chirp

Inside my made-up world, I can go very far

Not a song

Not an echo

but a faraway place where there's only freedom

I'm bird, bird flying in that place

That is not exactly a typical passage, though, as Kim is usually wilder, stranger, more surreal. Try this:

You died faraway and returned

Daddy, like an owl,

you perch on the dining table

and see night during the day

night during the night

Daddy, when you're too embarrassed, 

you swear every other word

like I swear at myself in the third person

Everybody says it's my fault

and not my brother's fault

Daddy, your flesh-colored head

spews white hair like a white trumpet

I wondered a bit at translator Don Mee Choi's decision to go with "Daddy" throughout the book, since the word will certainly remind English-speaking readers of Sylvia Plath, but it turned out Kim is conversant with Plath (see p. 127), and the intertextual echo came to seem, as in the quoted passage, uncannily  resonant.

Kim may not attract an audience the size of those for K-Pop, or South Korean film, or even Han Kang's novels, but if you were wondering whether South Korea's cultural explosion is also happening in poetry, the answer is yes.