| View Larger Image | Driving and Drinking | Paperbackby David Lee (Author)
| List Price: | $12.00 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press | | Edition: | Second Editionth Edition | | Page Count: | 60 Pages | | Publication Date: | July 01, 2004 | | Sales Rank: | 1,297,509st |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Inside a truck in rural Utah, a pig farmer tells his young friend "Turn right up there / and get off these pavements." What follows are cold beers and the monologue of a semiliterate man telling his heart's tale. The interweaving stories-caustic, hilarious and heart-rending-create one of the most haunting and accomplished poems of our time. Driving and Drinking takes about an hour to read. It will stay with you a lifetime. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 1 review)
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Storytelling in a darker vein. by Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)  3 Stars
March 30, 2009
David Lee, Driving and Drinking (Copper Canyon, 1982)
Driving and Drinking, a long poem comprising the whole of David Lee's second book, hits one of those buttons that absolutely grates on my nerves: the misspelling of the word "thought" as "thot". This in a sea of other dialect-style spelling, which generally drives me up the wall, but "thot" is one of those that has always gotten farther under my skin than most, and so I can't claim objectivity here; the fact that this rubs me the wrong way may have no effect whatsoever on your reading of it, so take the following with as much salt as necessary. That said, here's a representative example of the diction to be found here:
"I run a fish boat for years
on the river it was a good way to make
a little money back then
during the depression it got so bad
to where one time the auction only offered us
a dollar apiece for top hogs then charged
20 cents to handle so's we had to take
over a hundred head out and shoot them
cause it wasn't worth it but I could
make enough to get by poaching fish..."
(19-20)
That's one of the sections where most everything is spelled the way you're used to seeing it, but that lack of punctuation is common here, as well. Now that I think about it, actually, maybe it really is time for David Lee to come back into vogue; the rambling, punctuation-less, tangential one-sided conversation is a hallmark of the Instant Messaging generation. It should go brilliantly.
What it reminded me of, however, is the opening monologue from Jon Jost's Last Chants for a Slow Dance, and the narrator here has that same sort of creepy/pathetic vibe about him that Tom does in that film. Lee's pig farmer is a lot funnier, however, and one certainly can't say that Driving and Drinking isn't readable in any way; unlike a lot of work, both poetry and prose, written in the kind of heavy dialect Lee employs here, he has a fine enough touch with it that it rolls off the tongue easily, and few words are far enough away from their usual spellings for the reader to need to pause and reread a lone a few times to figure out what that word's supposed to be. (There is one, however, that took me until a second use to figure out. No, I won't tell you what, you'll have to find it yourself.)
Fainter-hearted readers should probably be warned that the subject matter here might distress them at times, and our narrator has never even heard the term "political correctness" (and had he'd probably equate it to supporting Barry Goldwater in some election somewhere), and so you may run into some terms you find offensive. None of which should stop you from actually reading the thing, should you stumble across it. Me, I thot it was fun. ***
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Hayden Carruth says that the small-town idioms comprising David Lee's poems are full of music, humor, and good sense, and that's a pretty good summary of the project. Like Mark Twain before him, though, Lee puts some teeth in his warm-hearted agrarian writing. Check out "Ugly," for instance. It's a very dark, very hilarious poem about how a man determined to commit suicide kept failing, ruining yet another facial feature with each attempt. Similarly, in "Clean," Lee describes how the ...
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