University of Utah Press, 2016 Paper: 978-1-60781-481-8 | eISBN: 978-1-60781-482-5 Library of Congress Classification PS3563.C34348A6 2016 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
contents
foreword
Tradition Bearer
First Hard Freeze
A Family Story
Wind in the Ozarks
Dumpster Honey
In His Own Country
Freshwater Drum
Gray Fox, a Resolution of Sorrow
The Widder Mercer
Of Thorns
Trundle
Liquid Assets
Deterred
Sight Unseen
Found Downriver
Road Trip
Postcard from the Ozarks: Winter
Reunion
Not Untwist
Aubade for the Yazoo Clipper
The Hill Itself
Trash Fish; or, Nights Back Home
- 34 -Ozark Landscape
The Sign of the Muskellunge
Playing the Beer Can
It Took Some Doin’
lore
biomass: a genealogy
q&a
lone
dot dot dot
between the wolf and the dog
eternal, restless
lupophobia
wet [weather] spring[s]
winter count: a bullet list
riddle/translation
Coda
Old Stith
notes
acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Utah Press, 2016 Paper: 978-1-60781-481-8 eISBN: 978-1-60781-482-5
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
contents
foreword
Tradition Bearer
First Hard Freeze
A Family Story
Wind in the Ozarks
Dumpster Honey
In His Own Country
Freshwater Drum
Gray Fox, a Resolution of Sorrow
The Widder Mercer
Of Thorns
Trundle
Liquid Assets
Deterred
Sight Unseen
Found Downriver
Road Trip
Postcard from the Ozarks: Winter
Reunion
Not Untwist
Aubade for the Yazoo Clipper
The Hill Itself
Trash Fish; or, Nights Back Home
- 34 -Ozark Landscape
The Sign of the Muskellunge
Playing the Beer Can
It Took Some Doin’
lore
biomass: a genealogy
q&a
lone
dot dot dot
between the wolf and the dog
eternal, restless
lupophobia
wet [weather] spring[s]
winter count: a bullet list
riddle/translation
Coda
Old Stith
notes
acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE