Ultima Thule
Will be published approx. on 3. April 2000
Book
Paperback/Softback
72 pages
978-0-300-08317-0 (ISBN)
Description
2000 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Poetry
This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Davis McCombs's Ultima Thule, which was acclaimed as "a book of exploration, of searching regard . . . a grave, attentive holding of a light" by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs's experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems deal with Mammoth Cave's four-thousand-year human history and the thrills of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond. Often the poems search for oblique angles into personal experience, and the caves and the landscape they create form a personal geology.
This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Davis McCombs's Ultima Thule, which was acclaimed as "a book of exploration, of searching regard . . . a grave, attentive holding of a light" by the contest judge, the distinguished poet W. S. Merwin. The poems are set above and below the Cave Country of south central Kentucky, where McCombs lives and which is home to thousands of caves. The book is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s and the second about McCombs's experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems deal with Mammoth Cave's four-thousand-year human history and the thrills of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond. Often the poems search for oblique angles into personal experience, and the caves and the landscape they create form a personal geology.
Reviews / Votes
"[McCombs] lucidly mines Kentucky's cave country. . . . Throughout, Mammoth's fantastical underworld-a place of 'eyeless fish,' dripstone nodules that 'live and grow, and when struck, produce/melodious tones, liquid and wavering,' boat rides on subterranean rivers reminiscent of 'Styx, Lethe'-is calmly revealed through McCombs's translucent, musical language. . . . The rough geology of the landscape . . . and the discovery of its shape . . . become urgent images that strikingly illuminate darkened interior spaces."-Megan Harlan, New York Times Book ReviewSelected as a finalist for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award in the Poetry category
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
118 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-08317-0 (9780300083170)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Davis McCombs received a B.A. in 1993 from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia in 1995. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 1996 to 1998. His poem "The River and Under the River" was featured in The Best American Poetry 1996; other work has appeared in the Missouri Review, no roses review, and the Columbia Poetry Review.