My Town by David Lee (review)

266 Western American Literature makes its way in the world: being nurtured or injured, reaching out in sympathy or closing in a little to protect itself. Nye and Stafford both favor reaching out, but they dramatize a whole range of responses. They invite us to understand our own stories by telling theirs with memorable details. One of the best poems, “White Silk,” takes off from a Zen meditation—“Try to be a piece of white silk.” After a stunning series of dream images of silk, we find the poet in a general store, examining a bolt of white silk with smooth brown lines at the creases: we return to the world of iron skillets, but feel extended by the imaginative journey. The title of her collection, Words Under the Words, expresses a confidence in ultimate meaningfulness of our descriptions of reality. If we listen, we can hear the inner meaning. The essays in Never in a Hurry share much with the poetry. They have the openness to experience and the flexibility of development that we value in the essay form. The variety of the book is one of its pleasures: the essays range from long narratives to vignettes to prose poems. The places of her subtitle include Palestine, Oahu, Rajasthan, Maine, and Oregon. She is most compelling when she writes about her complex heritage. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, and makes those diverse places familiar to us. Perhaps the finest essays are the ones dealing with the Palestinian village where her father began his life: the figure of her grandmother, who died at 106 and lived her whole life in one place, is unforgettable. It is not easy to speak for Palestinian villagers in present-day America. Nye conveys the reality of their lives, practicing a politics of sympathy—we can surely think of “politics” in a broad sense, as the ways in which people deal with one another in this world. The essays about San Antonio remind us that there are many villages, some of them within large American cities. She writes about the poor and the immigrants in those villages without condescension, because she has a conviction of their value. Readers will find similar satisfactions in both books: memorable language, lively imagination, and deep human sympathies. BERT ALMON University ofAlberta My Town. By David Lee. (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1995. 137 pages, $12.00.) Before My Town, winner of the 1995 Western States Book Award, I had not read David Lee’s poetry. A colleague recommended The Porcine Canticles, but I had enough of hogs back on the farm. Now, I will reconsider. The porkers in My Town are good folks. Some of the humans are too, especially old man Reviews 267 Cummings, school janitor/disciplinarian, pig farmer, and amazing healer of man and beast. However, most other townspeople have concentrated humanity’s usual eccentricity to a painfully comic pungency. The other creatures, great and small, mainly contribute to the human pain and the comedy. Awakened by cats fighting under her bedcovers, a townswoman reacts. “Neighbors came running/ thought it was a tragedy/ her being raped or dying/ they wanted to see” (“Vera”). Her bared cancer-swollen abdomen was a dis­ tracting revelation. My Town is a hard-assed place. But people are not indiffer­ ent. Rough affection and concern shape the neighborliness. The poems of My Town, whether howlers, groaners, or serious, build tales tall enough to stand with the other timber of American regionalism. Lee writes his poems in a created language that echoes any expressive folk who wear their education lightly. Sometimes, townspeople’s care for precision (“She has to have/ a hystericalalectomy for women” [“Faith Tuttle”]) places them as much in the company of Mesdames Malaprop and Slipslop as of Sut Lovingood, moving us beyond regionalism. Stylistically, Lee’s energy of phrasing rests upon fluid unaccented syllables, proportioned so that accents carry a disproportionate weight, reflective of what William Carlos Williams called the “variable foot.” All this skill creates risk. An unsophisticated narrator can ring hollow. However, these poems have a solid thump. The style’s compelling wryness con­ trols pain with laughter, but does...