My Town

by David Lee

Overview

Winner, 1995 Western States Book Award. Peopled with some of the most authentically drawn characterizations of rural life since Mark Twain, Lee's is a small town universe--"an aural agrarian saga,"--is filled with hilarity, love, labor, tragicomedy, and compassionate wisdom.¶"It's a speech full of eloquence, pathos, and humor, full of music, full of good sense. I could read it all week."--Hayden Carruth

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556590740
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	08/01/1995
Pages:	132
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Reading Lee's poetry is like sitting on a wide porch in the summer with a favorite uncle you don't see often and listening to him ramble along with tales of the local townsfolk. Lee (Day's Work, Copper Canyon Pr., 1990) captures the grit and authenticity of "country" speech in rural Utah in a manner reminiscent of James Whitcombe Riley. "Jesse Dixon didn't have no wife or kids/it was pigpens by his trailer outside town/he raised 200 hogs at a time instead" begins one poem, and another, "It isn't no easy way/to find the endpiece of wore/oncet it's in the roll" ("wore," we discover, is "wire"). Many of these poems, with vocabulary and spelling misunderstandings typical of the unschooled ("hystericalectomy," for example) reflect small-town preoccupations with illness and spectacular accidents. This absorbing volume of yarns entertains but sometimes disappoints; the significance of the described predicaments and occurrences is rarely explored. Lee's dialogs of farm folk won this volume the 1995 Western States Book Award in poetry. Recommended for most collections.-Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward

Library Journal