Kim Nam Jo’s early poetry focused on honoring the invaluable nature of life. In Life (1953), her first poetry collection, Kim expressed her attachment to life by exploring various forms of human loss precipitated by war. Her affirmation of humanity, reverence for life, and the warmth of her poetry founded on spirituality have ensured her place in history as a great artist.

Kim started writing poetry in her childhood, a time characterized by the absence of her mother tongue, the devastating aftermath of war, and severe deprivation. In such conditions, she reflected on the human condition, and realized a healing amidst pain, and an aesthetic of spirituality and love. In her second collection, Fragrant Oil of Nard (1955), Kim introduced Mary Magdalene as a new character in her poems, where Mary Magdalene is described as a saint of sin and contrition, and a woman who embraced Jesus’s soul in its entirety. To Kim, Mary Magdalene, who has become a symbol of the greatness of motherly love along with the Virgin Mary in the Catholic doctrine, is an existence akin to a textbook that is difficult to understand. Kim once revealed that her world of poetry was able to originate through the presence of Mary Magdalene. The poet summoned into her poems a woman who has been alienated and subjected to discrimination, and raised her in the name of the holiest and most beautiful form of embrace. That is, the “woman, the one of sin, repentance, and pealing resonance,” arrived “with her soul seared by burns” and was reborn into an existence that renders the poet into someone who “cannot approach such a woman” and whose “spirit [is] faint as [she] kneels in prayer.”

On such a religious foundation Kim unearths the deepest depth of poetry that sees through the dichotomy of extinction and generation, death and life, pity and love. Her representative poem “The Winter Sea” is about a yearning for the will to live, to rise back on one’s feet after the futility and despair of reality through the medium of soliloquy and prayer. In this poem, winter and sea both have the dual meaning of extinction and generation. Where it is cold enough to freeze one’s tears, the only way one can endure one’s own existence is through fire. As such, the intensity of one’s sense of futility also grows stronger. In such a hopeless reality, the poet confesses that ultimately it is only time that enables her to endure. The winter sea then transforms into a space for prayer and yearning in order to obtain the ability to endure the ordeals of reality. The repetition of the line “The days remaining may be few” emphasizes how the poet pursues a life of truth within the limitations of being human.

In her poem “Life,” nature is depicted as the mother of life who arrives with her cold body, and prepares for the green fields of winter barley. The beautiful piece of crystal hidden inside the poem is the place where life enters with its cold body to brighten our surroundings. Kim, holding her uniquely delicate gaze, continues to sublimate from a religious perspective the primitive power that elevates the human soul. For Kim, poetry is an omnipresent principle that enables existential discoveries as a poet, and at the same time is a fundamental discipline that completes her own life. Poetry is something that blossoms in the feelings of pity and love for a weak and finite existence.

As such, religion and poetry for Kim are simultaneous acts that envelop life and ultimately take a distinct form that converges towards life. Around the time when her collection Love’s Cursive (1974) was published, the theme of Kim’s poetry focused on love, and while she was able to overcome the emotional dimension that was visible in her earlier works such as burning passion, feverish longing, anguish and despair, her poems began to express a more fundamental scope spanning religion, spirituality, and emotion. Here, Kim began to strive towards an existential exploration of life by continuously inquiring into the nature of love, the source and driving force of her life.

Many of the poems in her collection Companionship (1976) are about trees, and the poet discovers the acts of mercy and blessing that God pours over all forms of life, offering a prayer of gratitude. In this regard the rapturous joy for the mystery behind the life force of nature expands into a type of sacred territory. By this time, the poetics of love, which Kim has consistently pursued, appears as a mature form of pity; and the eyes that gaze with pity in her poetry have expanded their field of vision from the initial focus on love between humans to include the relationships between God and man, God and nature, and man and nature. As the poet later expressed in Companionship as well as in her two subsequent poetry collections Christening of the Wind (1988) and For Peace of Mind (1995), she intentionally “wrote in a voice which she personally considers to be consistent, to suggest that we practice reconciliation, rest, and consolation.”

This writing process has continued and is also visible in her most recent collection My Heart Aches (2013). It is impossible to deny that the poems in this book are real examples of a wide range of voices, from the lyrical ones raised in the postwar ruins to the delicately low ones audible in the twenty-first century—voices that contain the numerous yet harmonious layers of sustainability and homogeneity. In this collection, Kim sings elegantly and piously of how those who exist, in their deep and pitiful lives, depend on and compete against each other through the words and glances they exchange.

Ultimately the theme that Kim has sung throughout the years is unique in that eros and agape barely manage not to let go of each other’s hand. Whether it is a human lover or God, the object of love in Kim’s poems is not an impassionate or unconscious object, but a living entity that shares the same level of self-consciousness as the poet herself. Therefore, the love that we experience in Kim’s poetry is not autoregressive, but shows the characteristics of reciprocal communication with others. As such, the process that affirms love continues to sparkle without fail in the world of her poetry, and there is a clear goal of obtaining ultimate salvation through that love.

Kim Nam Jo has lived by the love bestowed on her from her god, has written poetry with the belief that all poems are songs of love, and writes new poems based on her life and faith. In the end her poems are graceful hymns of pious love and salvation that, in the history of Korean literature, have further deepened the classical domain of reaching salvation through a form of articulation that combines the empirical and the poetic. 

by Yoo Sungho