The day a set of travel books turned into a box of ramen... Life and freedom through Moon Chung-hee’s poetry [fn Book Briefing]

The day a complete set of world travel books turned into a box of ramen, a woman bursts into tears. They are tears she had held back even when selling her wedding ring. It is a scene from Moon Chung-hee’s poem “Dream.” Poverty reaches beyond the dinner table, encroaching on the imagination and freedom of someone who encountered unfamiliar worlds through books.Moon Chung-hee’s poetry anthology *When the First Sorrow Awakens* (Dal) draws up life’s sorrows and joys through bodily sensation. Poet Lee Byungryul selected 55 poems from six collections, including “Flock of Birds,” “A Bell Tolling as It Collapses Alone” and “Wild Rose.” The book offers a chance to encounter again the language of a poet who published *Flower Breath* while still in high school in 1965 and made her debut after winning the newcomer prize from *Monthly Literature* in 1969.■ Beyond poverty and oppression: the language of the bodyWhat Yeon-i brought in her bedding bundle when she married in “Dream” was Kim Chan-sam’s world travelogue. Her husband is an unemployed young man of letters, and the rice jar is empty, but every night Yeon-i travels the world through books. Through a single household object, the poem asks how wide a life a woman is allowed to have.
The voice seeking to speak for itself about its own life and body is equally clear. In “A Mother’s Letter,” a mother tells her daughter, “Your life is your own.” Her urging to let all the fire burning in the heart and body burn fully conveys a refusal to suppress women’s desires.
In her endorsement, poet Kim So-yeon described Moon Chung-hee’s poetry as “the first time the Korean language spoke of a woman’s body in its own voice.”
Personal freedom also becomes a voice directed at the times. “With a Pen of Pure Silver—For the Poets of This Land” depicts the moment when the language of poetry rises like the tolling of a bell amid forces that choke the breath and a monsoon of unfreedom. In “The Poet’s Words,” Moon Chung-hee recalled, “Chaos and wounds all returned as the intense flesh of poetry.”■ Poems that embrace joy and pain togetherIn “Peeling Strawberries,” conflicting sensations overlap even in a familiar fruit. The children sense God’s handiwork as they eat strawberries, but the speaker trembles, thinking of poison that no amount of washing can remove. As the strawberry is cut with a knife, its beauty and the pleasure of eating it seem to be cut away too.
“The Side of Life” looks back on a life in which long hours of each day must be filled with work. After lamenting that romance, singing or drinking cannot go on for eight hours, the poem unfolds an image of someone happily wrapping pain in a cloth and unwrapping it. In a tone that mingles complaint and laughter, pain and pleasure become intertwined.
“Farewell, Butterfly” gazes at life that cannot help but disappear. The poem calls the process of rotting into soil dazzling, and embraces as a blessing the possibility of loving passionately while alive before vanishing without a trace. Knowing that life is finite makes love in the present more urgent.
In his endorsement, poet Hwang In-chan called the resolve to love life despite knowing its pain “gentle strength.” Moon Chung-hee wrote, “I dedicate this collection to readers who are sad and beautiful.”
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