A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems - Softcover

Lee, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556590970 ISBN 13: 9781556590979

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 1999

Synopsis

Bobby Joe

if i should die before I wake...

I don't know if I believed in ghosts
before Bobby Joe Lee had his stroke

that big man we called Bull lying there
all them years in that hospital room

wasn't nothing they could do
but wait and see

if he'd try to wake up or let it go
he was like a lightning-struck tree

didn't even know it was gone
alone in there, blind and lost

until the next firestorm come
to finish him off

The PBS-TV documentary on David Lee was entitled "The Pig Poet," and according to The Denver Post that sobriquet didn't bother Utah's poet Laureate: "I've rarely in my life been without a pig." Pigs, and the gentle-hearted redneck roustabout John, feature prominently in Lee's narratives and are integral to what he calls his "aural agrarian saga." This saga, written over the past two decades, is also populated with some of the most authentically drawn characters since those of Mark Twain. Lee's small-town universe is frequented by tragedy and near-tragedy, and transcendence most often arrives in the form of salvaged humor, whether ironic, self-depricating, or ribald.

"David Lee's pig poems are the best thing to happen to animals in poetry since Kit Smart's cat.'-Thomas McGrath

"Lee's calculatedly simple narratives are wonderfully wrought. His is a welcome voice, neither academic nor urban."-Booklist

Also available by David Lee

David Lee: A Listener's Guide Reading from: A Legacy of Shadows and News from Down to the CaféAudio CD $12.00, 1-55659-137-3.

About this title

About the Author

David Lee, author of eight books of poetry, was Utah's first Poet Laureate. A former seminary candidate, semi-pro baseball player, and hog farmer, he has a Ph.D. with a concentration in Milton and is the recently retired head of the Languages and Literature department at Southern Utah University.

Reviews

Lee's first book, The Porcine Legacy (1974), delineated the themes and style that he has investigated right up to his latest book. "Young feller," the Virgil-like "John" advises the poet in the Selected's opening "Loading a Boar," "if you wanna by god write pomes you gotta write pomes about what you know and not about the rest and you can write about pigs and that boar and Jan and you and me and the rest and there aint no way you're gonna quit." Lee has stuck to this idea, perhaps too closely, though with gestures toward variety. His irreverence is not as winning as, say, James Tate's, whom he sometimes resembles in his half-ironic, but never cynical, view of life, and displays none of Tate's formal inclinations. Quite often, the poems seem like magazine fiction mining a Prairie Home Companion-like vein. At his best, however, strains of Frost or Edgar Lee Masters come through clearly, as in the short but effective "Idyll" (also from the Selected), about "Charley Baker's idiot girl/ [...] picking dandelions/ [...] mind empty as sky," which ends: "No bother/ wind rooting her curls/ she was happy in the flowers/ waving half-acre handfuls/ of gold coins/ to the cars going by." The selections from 1996's Covenants show a fondness for long titles, and the poem "What Happened When Bobby Jack Cockrum Tried to Bring Home a Pit Bulldog, or, What His Daddy Said to Him That Day," is worthy of James Wright, another connoisseur of asymmetrical headers. News brings us more of Lee's unpretentious, open and generous take on his countryfolk and countryALee lives in St. George, Utah, and is the state's poet laureateAbut although his ear for speech is sharper than ever, and he renders it crisply on the page, most readers will want more than a diversionary visit with local color. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556590970
• ISBN 13: 9781556590979
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300