문학과 지성사

A Mathematician’s Morning is the fourth poetry collection of Kim Soyeon, who, since her debut in 1993, has investigated the poetics in casting light amid silence and excavating compassion from coldness. In this book, the poet illustrates with her exquisite language the sharp sensations that emerge while observing the quiet shadows of still objects and morning scenery. “We say ‘deep in the night,’ but why has no one said ‘deep in the morning’?” inquires the poet. Replete with the poet’s distinctively acute sensibilities, A Mathematician’s Morning enchants its readers by momentarily entering death every morning to see the invisible and hear the inaudible. Hwang Hyeon San, a veteran literary critic who had deconstructed poetry with a poignant intellect, left a heartfelt epilogue, rather than a commentary, to this book by a younger-generation poet. In this epilogue, he praises Kim Soyeon as a poet who “knows how to unearth the deepest understandings from the deepest places of the world” and discovers courage in the grief that evokes empathy in the poems. As Hwang says, when Kim Soyeon encounters grief, even if it once felt like it would never come, she burnishes even that in her poetry.

A poet, an essayist, a former director of a children’s library, and a person who writes and teaches poetry, Kim Soyeon is always found in a place where she is needed, according to Hwang. The wide range of her works has expressed emotions so thoroughly that there might hardly be a reader who hasn’t owed the poet for the words and sentences to express feelings. As Hwang put it, “the era didn’t even know how to exploit [the poet’s] feelings” and we can’t but pay our due attention to Kim Soyeon’s fourth poetry collection. Because the language born of “the time woven with her deepest sorrow” is only made possible by Kim Soyeon, an “emotion mogul” who writes poetry with all of her body.