Although the cover and some of the epigraphs would indicate focus on Crazy Horse and the lost Lakota way of life, John B. Lee’s latest collection of verse, The Last Stand, touches on matters much more complex. At a first reading, it appears to be a lamentation, an agonized retrospection of a place now lost, ground down not just by time, but by the adversity imposed its own natural processes of existing. It can be perceived as melancholy, weeping for what had been, with a subtle challenge for the reader to evaluate whether what has gone before was worth anything of value, and whether the transience of life, whatever its form, has any meaning whatsoever in the Grand Scheme, It takes at least a second reading, and maybe a third or even more, for the reader to discern and acknowledge its underlying premise that all things, animate and inanimate, must change, including the reader’s attitude toward what can be gleaned from what has gone before. The collection highlights that “The Great American West” was grand and sordid at the same time, and it requires the maturity and openness of the reader to appreciate the dichotomy. John expresses in a few lines, emotions beyond the capacity of a novelist or essayist, of anyone but a true poet.
F. W. Abel
Author of the From Slave to Soldier series of novels