Gunslinger [Paperback]

Edward Dorn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 1989

Dorn’s high-spirited, crazy-quilt, complex anti-epic is a masterful critique of late twentieth-century capitalism and is one of the great comic poems of American literature. Dorn is one of the few political poets in America; this fantasy about a demigod cowboy, a saloon madam, and a talking horse named Claude Levi-Strauss, who travel the Southwest in search of Howard Hughes, as become a minor classic.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Dorn cleverly mixes the jargon of junkies, Westerners, structuralists, and scientists to reflect the jumble of American speech. He intentionally frustrates the reader: syntax is ambiguous, punctuation in sparse, and puns, homonyms, and nonsense words become an integral part of conversation. Donald Wesling has declared that such frustration is 'one of the pleasures of the poem when you finally discover the mechanism.'"--Contemporary Authors

Product Details

• Paperback: 223 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (September 18, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822309327
• ISBN-13: 978-0822309321
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #740,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Do It, August 1, 2003

By 

Paul F. Starrs "geography fan" (El Cerrito, CA, and Reno, NV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gunslinger (Paperback)

It's great that Ed Dorn's poem (in book form, though it was originally published in a sequence of smaller parts, and assembled) is back in print, after the single-volume version took a short drop to the OOP lists. There are few poems that so effectively capture a decade -- and a century. Read it; fight with it; enjoy the sensibility. This is a book about the American West and, like the work of Charles Olson (one of Dorn's teachers), it is about poetry as a means of understanding aspects of the psyche, motivation, and acquisitiveness that is so American.

That's the good new; you'll read this and laugh about parts, and agonize over others, and relish still more. But be wary of the "Introduction," which is a heavy bolus of words (read the back cover excerpt, if you doubt me). Yes, the folks at Duke (a University Press) felt it necessary to drop a scholarly "Introduction" on the book, but Perloff's offering will inspire you to reach for your Metamucil. As a scholar, she is accomplished (publications on Beckett, Plath, Pound, O'Hara, Lowell, Stevens, Yeats, Williams, Berryman, Rimbaud, Zukofsky, Blackburn, John Cage, Goethe, Ginsberg, Ashbery, and a dozen others), but her treatment of Dorn is at best wooden, and with 35 years of writing on poets she musters great range without summoning either a notable depth or enthusiasm.

Buy the book for Dorn's own work and fight to cherish the results.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece, December 19, 1999

By 

Ted Burke "Ted Burke" (San Diego) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gunslinger (Paperback)

The late Ed Dorn wrote a masterpiece with "Gunslinger", an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorns' narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.

A masterpiece

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars John Bunyan in a showdown with Paul Bunyan, December 20, 1999

By 

DJ Rix (NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gunslinger (Paperback)

An epic poem so richly filled with wisdom, wordplay & laughs that a little of it is often enough. Dorn's characters - who are derived from both John Bunyan & Paul Bunyan - wander through a landscape that feels like a spaghetti western existing inside a Star Trek wormhole. All of the rituals of the Great American Desert are honored & performed in ways that surprise & delight. The cinematography is nonpareil. Does the Zlinger fall in love with Lil? Does he ride off into the Sunset of Happy Trails? Does Walter Brennan make a cameo appearance? Read on, fellow pilgrims, read on.

Bob Rixon