The Bull Rider's Advice : New and Selected Poems

Anew book of poetry by David Allan Evans is always an occasion for great celebration among readers of verse. And a collection that brings together twenty-seven new poems with three dozen selected from his four books already in print is especially welcome.

The book includes a Foreword by Federal Judge Lawrence L. Piersol of Sioux Falls, and a Preface by the author about his career as a poet, especially his early, formative years in his hometown of Sioux City, Iowa, and the lasting effects those years have had on his life and his writing. In particular, many of the poems—selected and new—contain images and experiences that originated in a neighborhood on a railroad bluff, where Evans spent his early teen years.

In his first poem from his first book, Train Windows, he writes about learning to pole vault in the vacant lot next to his house, and about being "committed to beginnings/or to nothing."

These poems reflect not only Evans’passion for the drama of sports—he is one of the country’s best-known poets on that subject—but also his observations of animals, his father’s lasting influence on him, and of relationships among people, along with the positive and negative results of those relationships. The titles of some of the poems are revealing: "The Man in the Rendering Room," "Deer on Cars," "Bus Depot Reunion," "The Touchdown in Slow motion," "For the Woman Who Cleans My Teeth," "Lions," "The Kiss," "A South Dakota Inventory," "The Ponies of Kunming, China," and "Death and Exile."

David Allan Evans began college on a football scholarship at Augustana. He has degrees from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, University of Iowa, and University of Arkansas. He has won writing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bush Artist Foundation. He has traveled extensively with his wife, Jan, and has twice been a Fulbright Scholar in China. He lives in Brookings, South Dakota, where he is a professor of English and Writer in Residence at South Dakota State University. His short stories, poems, and nonfiction have been published in numerous magazines and journals and in over 60 anthologies, including: Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, Best Poems of 1969 (Borestone Awards), The HBJ Treasury of Literature, Poetspeak, Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest, As Far as I Can See, Voices in the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets, Motion: The Anthology of American Sports Poems, The Norton Book of Sports, and Splash! Great Writing about Swimming and Diving. Evans was appointed Poet Laureate of South Dakota in 2002.