A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems - Hardcover

Lee, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556590989 ISBN 13: 9781556590986

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2000

Synopsis

Poems. Taking great care to elucidate the ordinary lives of rural Americans, David Lee's selected poems contain the famous pig poems which led a PBS-TV documentary to brand him The Pig Poet. Yet pigs are only part of the story. They join with folks like the gentle-hearted, redneck roustabout John Sims, or Elis Britton, the meanest man in the world, as cast members of Lee's aural agrarian saga. Lee is the Poet Laureate of Utah.

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: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556590989
• ISBN 13: 9781556590986
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 300