lore Format: Paperback

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize 

Drawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs’s third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, and nearly forgotten ways of being and talking and doing. Rendered in a language of great lexical juxtapositions, here are days of soil and labor, nights lit only by firelight, and the beings, possibly not of this world, lured like moths to its flames. McCombs, always a poet of place and of rootedness, writes poems teetering between two locales, one familiar but achingly distant, one bewildering but alluringly present. 

Davis McCombs is the author of two previous collections of poetry. His first book, Ultima Thule, was chosen by W. S. Merwin as the winner of the 1999 Yale Series of Younger Poets. It was also selected as one of five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His second book, Dismal Rock (Tupelo Press), was awarded the Dorset Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award, and the Kentucky Literary Award. McCombs directs the Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas.