Amazon.com Review
Hayden Carruth says that the small-town idioms comprising David Lee's poems are full of music, humor, and good sense, and that's a pretty good summary of the project. Like Mark Twain before him, though, Lee puts some teeth in his warm-hearted agrarian writing. Check out "Ugly," for instance. It's a very dark, very hilarious poem about how a man determined to commit suicide kept failing, ruining yet another facial feature with each attempt. Similarly, in "Clean," Lee describes how the children of fanatics are doomed to suffer: "Cleanest woman that ever lived / was Mizrez Bullard / her kids' ears bled she scrubbed so hard ..."
From Publishers Weekly
Colloquial phrasing and rhythms mark this 1995 Western States Book Award winner, the latest volume of an on-going epic which includes, among other titles, The Porcine Canticles. Though some may challenge Lee's version of American country life as depicted in these narrative poems, vernacular voices like his are few on the current poetry scene. "Back home ever fall at the fair/they had a fruit judging/from whoever's trees wanted/to bring it in..." Many protagonists are present in a variety poems. Mr. Cummings, briefly introduced in an opening reminiscent of Spoon River Anthology, is later seen as grade school janitor, disciplinarian, faith healer and man haunted all his life by one night and a gypsy girl. Lee, whose voice is usually that of narrator, evokes parallels other than Masters: Robert Service, Whitman, E.A. Robinson, even Williams, in Patterson. This work, if perhaps not ageless, is accessible, always appealing and often memorable.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
