Drive, They Said : Poems about Americans and Their Cars

What icon better defines America's experiences, dreams, foibles, escapes, and obsessions than the automobile? And what experience more perfectly captures the American spirit - moving on, westering, wandering - than driving? In this anthology, editor Kurt Brown collects the best of the innumerable poems that have made driving their emblem during the century known as the Automobile Age.
Poems from nearly one hundred contemporary writers are gathered in this hommage to America's obsession with the automobile, including Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Bly, Rosellen Brown, Hayden Carruth, Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, and Thomas McGrath. The anthology's sections define driving as "the rolling forward toward the future" for both men and women; the meditative aspects of driving into the self; the experience of stopping by the side of the road as we rush wildly across the map; the crossing of destinies; the allegories of life itself.

Skip the editor's introduction, even though it does establish context ("Driving, then--relentless, continual, necessary, rolling motion--became such a universal experience in our century it was inevitable that it would find permanent expression in American poetry"), and just dive into this fabulous collection. Start anywhere--with sections on "Men in Cars," "Women in Cars," "Driving into Yourself," "Stopping by the Side of the Road," "Driving as Metaphor," and "On the Bus," the reader is treated to a wild ride with 98 poets who know their cars, know their roads and know how to write. Look for James Tate's "In the Realm of the Ignition" ("There is an X on this window, / Almost exquisite, the slight madness, / kiss and forgiveness"); Martha McFerren's "Leaving in 1927" ("You're very frightened. / You feel so good"); Joyce Carol Oates's "Night Driving" ("you love the enormous trucks floating in spray"); Stephen Dunn's "Truck Stop: Minnesota" ("I'm tempted to come back at her / with java /but I say coffee , politely"); Derek Walcott's "Upstate" ("Sometimes I feel sometimes / the Muse is leaving, the Muse is leaving America")--these are just some of the rewards. For more than 300 pages, the volume consistently delivers the poetic goods; it's a continuously engaging collection of Americana, poetic reverie, and flat-out, high-octane good times. It will make you wonder, as in Howard Nemerov's "Fugue," "Was there never a world where people just sat still?"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Americans' relationship with the automobile is often described as a love affair; poet Edward Hirsh, in the preface, is more emphatic, calling it a "central, constitutional feature of American life." United by a consciousness of the car's ubiquity and significance, these many poems find specific meanings in that situation by exploring both its literal and metaphoric aspects. The hypnotic intoxication of watching scenery zoom by; the need for heightened senses while driving at night; the car as instrument of destruction as witnessed in traffic accidents; the feeling of liberation when sitting behind the wheel on an open road; and the image of skidding tires failing to grip an unstable road surface as a symbol of the danger of losing control over one's life--these considerations and others are expounded on by such poets as Richard Hugo, James Tate, Robert Bly, Stephen Dobyns, and Howard Nemerov. Not for small, classics-only poetry collections, but for all larger, active ones. Brad Hooper