DISMAL ROCK - Softcover

Mccombs, Davis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932195483 ISBN 13: 9781932195484

Publisher: Tupelo Press, 2007

Synopsis

Poetry. DISMAL ROCK showcases a revisitation to the landscape of McCombs' youth on the tobacco farms of Kentucky. Initially chronicling events in local and family history, this collection of verse widens in scope until it includes subjects as diverse as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Elgin Marbles, John Keats, Bob Marley, fatherhood, and fishing. Several poems in this volume explore the grief McCombs feels over the loss of local culture as it resonates within the broader context of ecological destruction, imbuing the global with the undeniably personal.

About this title

About the Author

Currently director of the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas, Davis McCombs attended Harvard University and the University of Virginia and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lilly Poetry Foundation, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry 1996, The Missouri Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and his first book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was also the winner of the 2005 Dorset Prize.

From the Back Cover

This beautiful book records the sacraments of labor and the dark equivocations of history in a single swath of tobacco land in south central Kentucky. With infinite patience and luminous particularity, Davis McCombs unearths the traces of those-who-have-passed-before-us through the material world. How rare it is to encounter a writer -- to encounter any human being -- who finds the world more compelling than the self. McCombs is just such a paragon. And his poems have the weight of psalms.

--Linda Gregerson, Judge

I'm deeply impressed by the superb "Tobacco Mosaic." Generations of proud, humane craft have been transmuted into these wonderful elegies. Tobacco is unlikely ever to get a kinder memorial.

--Les Murray

One has a sense reading Dismal Rock that finally here is someone with the talent and character, the mythic vision, to take up the challenge thrown down by Walt Whitman. Davis McCombs is a young man, and twenty-first century poetry may well look forward to something the twentieth never quite managed: a body of work that, in its exploration of a very specific place, elucidates the universal. In Dismal Rock, and in his brilliant debut Ultima Thule, McCombs has managed to make the "new world," which for so long now has felt battered, exhausted, used-up, feel new again, new and holy and wondrous.

--Aleda Shirley

Reviews

McCombs follows up his Yale YoungerPoets Prize winning debut, Ultima Thule with another book-length study of life in Kentucky. The first section, "Tobacco Mosaic," is a sixteen-poem sequence about the decline of the burley tobacco farms of south-central Kentucky. The second, "The Mist Netters," is comprised of twenty-six lyrics addressing the American rural landscape and/or artistic making. Throughout, McCombs is wonderful with details: "Tonight, the year's first dust of snow started falling on the road/ past Mansfield Bend, and as I drove, it fell on Summer Seat,/ Paul Wheeler's Barn, and Haunted Hill. It fell, no doubt,/ on Woodsonville and darkly on the spine of Dismal Rock." Unfortunately, McCombs can also be melodramatic, as in "Nineveh," where the moonlight falls "like forgiveness," or in "Smoke," when a mysterious, ghost-like stranger warns us, "Tobacco is a holy spirit/ . . . but abuse it, and its power will kill you." Several poems in "The Mist Netters" consider McCombs' own process, among them "Noodling" (slang for catching catfish by hand, using the fingers as bait), which ends up an unintentionally comic echo of Elizabeth Bishop's famous poem "The Fish." Nonetheless, McCombs is a careful poet who looks thoroughly. He will be exactly what some readers are looking for.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Tupelo Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1932195483
• ISBN 13: 9781932195484
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 72