Day’s Work by David Lee (review)

Reviews 85 Runte is at his best in his discussions of the roles that scientists such as Joseph Grinnell and George Wright have played in Park history. He is at his worst when he too neatly separates actors in the Yosemite drama into saints and sinners and when he oversimplifies the complexity of human motivation. Heroes like Frederick Law Olmsted or Joseph Grinnell can hardly do wrong, while concessionaires David Curry, Donald Tresidder, and Edward Hardy are veritable Judases, betraying the high ideal of preservation for many pieces of silver. People who seek to make a profit are not necessarily crass or ignoble. Moreover, Runte is more than ready to excuse Olmsted or Grinnell when they falter, whereas when Tresidder makes a statement supportive of the goal of preservation, Runte claims that he is only cloaking his true intentions. In summary, this is a powerful and important book, a critical contribution to Yosemite historiography and ideology at a time when the politicizing of the National Park Service and the vast hordes of visitors pose genuine threats not only to the natural environment of Yosemite but to human emotional and spiritual engagement with those great beings, El Capitan, Sugar Pine, Bear, and Coyote. DAVID ROBERTSON University of California, Davis Day’s Work. By David Lee. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1990. 130 pages, $10.00.) In the tradition of his earlier books Driving and Drinking and The Porcine Canticles, David Lee’s Day’s Work celebrates rural working life in a language recognizable to those who actually participate in that life. As such, these poems fit solidly into an oral tradition, and to be sure, Lee’s poems may be best when delivered orally, if “best” means most immediately accessible, capable of deliv­ ering the most pleasure to the most people. But a key to the breadth of their success is that the poems are also highly literary. Dr. Lee is a Milton scholar with a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah, and his work is positively embedded in the tradition of the high literary canon. The book-length poem Driving and Drinking, for example, is patterned on Dante’s Inferno. Day’s Work, also has a clear relationship to tradition, from its opening invocations to the gods of rooster and sun in “After an All-Night Farrow” and “Sonnet on the Sun, Rising,” to an epic conflict between a freeloader and a chihuahua in “Arthritis,” to the final eccentric and moving benediction in “Pain.” Because of the plain speech, broad humor, and sometimes folksy wisdom of the poems in Day’s Work, a reader/listener needn’t be able to trace this tradition in order to enjoy them. But this relationship to tradition provides a tension that elevates the work into the realm of serious literature. Lee controls the arc of the book as a whole masterfully, partly by establish­ ing a tension between the speaker’s more academic speech and his storytelling 86 Western American Literature friend John’s rural speech and sensibility. Lee uses an early poem, “Phone Call,” to move the reader from the more poetic language of the opening lyrics into the rural language of the book’s heart—not an essential move, but one that emphasizes the author’s choice and purpose in using this language. As the day progresses, Lee intersperses the long narrative poems, largely in John’s voice, with “breaks” in the form of little lyrics. It’s a shame that these lyrics tend to get lost among the more ambitious, irresistably charming and funny longer poems, but even in that they serve their purpose of acting as rests in the action and counterpoints to the earthier language of the narratives. And language—the language of everyday tasks and storytelling—is key here. These are poems to be read aloud. And if you ever get the chance to hear David Lee read them himself, take it. He’s the only poet in Utah who can bring into one room and then reduce to tears of laughter and self-recognition a farmer, the Lieutenant Governor of the state, and the university’s most academic poets, all at the same...