Out of the Woods (Yale Series of Younger Poets) - Softcover

Bolt, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300044682 ISBN 13: 9780300044683

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1989

Synopsis

The winning volume in the 1988 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Out of the Woods by Thomas Bolt. As James Merrill, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said: "Here is an up-to-date pastoral: wrecked cars, glades of debris, polluted streams, all gravely held in Thomas Bolt's unflinching gaze. 'I had found,' he writes, 'the secret center of America.' Given this wealth of evidence, its bleakness and sparkle, we can almost bring ourselves to believe him."  A Hill in Virginia In this rude worldMemory pertainsIn bald things,Of promises skipped over, violenceOr accidents of kissing.Read within the deep patinaOf the old stumpOf a shainsawed black walnutIts circularHistory from sex to ruin; Look whereCracked and spattered chunks of cold quartzStuck in mudGlitter up from a dull hill.Downhill, the wrecked car:A punched in windshieldSags whole,An afterimage of collision,Brilliant with sky.

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Reviews

The woods in Bolt's poems are scattered with human debris--rusting cars, plastic bottles and broken glass. Bolt, winner of the 1988 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, judged by Merrill, handles his subject matter with admirable attention to detail and precision of language; he ranges easily from adjective-replete accounts to stark, minimalist statements. And when Bolt relates the crowded, wasted world to a self that is correspondingly mechanized and desolate, his strange poems strike chords in the reader. But often a detached speaker delineates a realm devoid of tension, drama or change and Bolt's inclination to suggest symbolic meanings for mundanities without fully explaining these is cryptic or heavy-handed. Significantly, "Six Descriptions," one of the volume's most appealing poems, is also one of the few that does not take place in the woods, growing instead from family remembrances to an awareness of death that is direct, personal and painful.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bolt invents a kind of anti-pastoral here, a grimly realistic version of rural Virginia wholly unlike the one found in Annie Dillard's famous Pilgrim at Tinker Creek . Bolt inhabits a wrecked Eden of barbed wire, refrigerators, mattress springs, bottomless buckets, glass shards, paint cans, Clorox bottles, and old Pontiacs: "Chromes flake and sprinkle gravel. A pale dust/ Coats the hubcaps." Billing himself as a "reporter of the unimportant," he resurrects his junkyards and polluted streams by turning their intricately observed decay into the stuff of art: a dishwasher is "furred with white mold" while dirty water becomes "screwed to a drain." Not surprisingly, Bolt is also a graphic artist, as suggested by his homage to Thomas Eakins ("Max Schmitt in a Single Scull"). A distinguished addition to a most distinguished series.
- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300044682
• ISBN 13: 9780300044683
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80