News from Down to the Cafe

Lee's first book, The Porcine Legacy (1974), delineated the themes and style that he has investigated right up to his latest book. ""Young feller,"" the Virgil-like ""John"" advises the poet in the Selected's opening ""Loading a Boar,"" ""if you wanna by god write pomes you gotta write pomes about what you know and not about the rest and you can write about pigs and that boar and Jan and you and me and the rest and there aint no way you're gonna quit."" Lee has stuck to this idea, perhaps too closely, though with gestures toward variety. His irreverence is not as winning as, say, James Tate's, whom he sometimes resembles in his half-ironic, but never cynical, view of life, and displays none of Tate's formal inclinations. Quite often, the poems seem like magazine fiction mining a Prairie Home Companion-like vein. At his best, however, strains of Frost or Edgar Lee Masters come through clearly, as in the short but effective ""Idyll"" (also from the Selected), about ""Charley Baker's idiot girl/ [...] picking dandelions/ [...] mind empty as sky,"" which ends: ""No bother/ wind rooting her curls/ she was happy in the flowers/ waving half-acre handfuls/ of gold coins/ to the cars going by."" The selections from 1996's Covenants show a fondness for long titles, and the poem ""What Happened When Bobby Jack Cockrum Tried to Bring Home a Pit Bulldog, or, What His Daddy Said to Him That Day,"" is worthy of James Wright, another connoisseur of asymmetrical headers. News brings us more of Lee's unpretentious, open and generous take on his countryfolk and country--Lee lives in St. George, Utah, and is the state's poet laureate--but although his ear for speech is sharper than ever, and he renders it crisply on the page, most readers will want more than a diversionary visit with local color. (Aug.)