Reviews of Downsides of Fish Culture
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“In the poems of David Lee, the world of nature, impassioned, brutal, swift, is not just out there in the Michigan drifts—it is in here, in us. How powerfully we are made to know this, beyond mere hope or reckless sorrow, is what I find most stunning—and most frightening—about his poems. This is a poetry so alive as to be almost ready to blow its seams—and would, but that it is governed decisively by craft and intelligence. Instead, I hold on, as we must, for dear life.”

–Nancy Eimers

Foreword by Charles D'Ambrosio
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David Lee's poems don't give us a picture of life lived per capita, life lived in the conglomerate heart or regressed to the mean, life polled and made plural--the old agreed upon world. No, instead, with these poems we are taken into the elusive, the simple, the hard, the resistant world, the one beyond all accommodation and comfort, the one we ultimately live and die in, singular as a pike with a Zippo in its belly. As an undertaking, this is spooky business, very intense and to my mind admirably quixotic in an age where wholesale numbness is available for the asking. And yet it's only in this singular world, approached brilliantly and without flinching in poem after poem, where at last enough clutter is cleared away and, with vision renewed and made raw, miracles once again pass before our eyes.

Some of the poems in this collection strike me as a mad search for the exact right word, the precise language, the image that will briefly put a stop to the need for searching altogether. Such a torqued up project carries an implicit threat of apocalypse, which is fine. For one thing it keeps the language harshly honest--you can't hurl pretty "poetic" phrases and hope these offerings will appease the beast. Take "Travelling"--a poem that's all full-blast like the Buddha, as a man once said to me, a poem that carries us out beyond the "cardboard walls" of cliche and dead imagination, out beyond the still lit porch light and the pockets of standing water into a vision where traveling, speeding, the elusive green flicker of life itself, finds a last, perfect adjustment of insight, so that the hope of arriving and having already arrived achieve an exact balance--an exact, hard-won, fragile balance--where adding another line, another word, even the merest sound, would undo the whole damn poem.

There are poems here ("First Turtle") in which a calm reigns frankly over the work as we negotiate the only legit deal language can make with life: clarity; and then there are the architectural beauties ("The Downsides of Fish Culture" or "Three Stories about Owls" or "1981"), ambitious poems that explore layers of perspective or develop a sideways narrative or test the reliability of memory. Again and again in this collection, David Lee tears the vanity mirror from the precious hand of language and forces poetry down a road more often traveled by fiction writers, turning the mirror around, as Fielding said, and holding it up to life itself.

And in his work, there is a consistent and thematic mood of aftermath. Is Lee giving voice to something generational? I believe so. How did we--those of us in our thirties--come to be on such casual nodding terms with death? In "the Auction" it is the young who arrive just in time to overlook the end of things. The young in these poems are granted only a crude innocence, a sort of trajectory. All that hard life, all the drugs, the screwing, the crazy escapades--a proving ground proving nothing--unfolding in a world come to rusting implements and the smell of constant death and the sagging dugs of a dignified old woman. And this is why David Lee insists we see life in the singular, and why these poems, vivid and vigilant, raw and urgent, speak to our needs. From now on, in this finished world, our miracles will come to us out of the material others have abandoned. Nowhere in recent American writing have I found such a marvelous evocation of a generation, the first to be so at home with halfness and failure, to accept the end as the raw material of life.