문학과 지성사

Moment when all the rest becomes the whole world.

The Snowman Inn is the third poetry collection of Lee Byungryul, who specializes in capturing the glimmers of life’s brilliance. This collection expands from Lee’s typical thematic concerns of the deep, quiet gaze at the bottomless sorrow and desperation inscribed in and outside of life into a more fundamental investigation of the origin of those emotions.

The speaker “I,” who prevails in this collection, is a being who is inexplicably “here,” like an odd puzzle piece that does not belong to the set. He has shed the countless relations he used to have with other individuals in society. By leaving them all, he focuses on the beginning when he was not yet poetry. As soon as he sets foot in the inn, whoever stands next to him would melt away. A self-contradicting being, a snowman that melts upon human contact prepares “I” for the disappearance of the social contract between himself and others. The Snowman Inn tells us that the crux of the journey to reestablish the solitude of being is a return to the inception of poetry, the seed sown in the soil of consciousness that will eventually sprout.