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Title: Ultima Thule by Davis McCombs, W. S. Merwin ISBN: 0-300-08317-3 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.71 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: here lies the good stuff
Comment: Recently I spent an extended vacation exploring Mammoth Cave National Park. I was amazed at the vastness and calm of the place. It has a grandeur and a haunting quality. Amidst it all I made another discovery: the powerful, in truth--the GREAT--poetry of Davis McCombs.
Somewhere in his evocations of place and suggestions of identity McCombs finds a beauty much like that of the caves. For the most part it isn't flashy. It is solid. It calls. It is true.
I'm not a huge fan of "narrative" poems. Most such literary beasts should become brave and full enough to stand as short stories. The language and, God help us, rhymes are more torture in such cases than poetry. Yet here in McCombs we have a master of narrative not seen on these shores since Poe.
More powerful than his narrative skills is McCombs's spareness of language. He communicates picture perfect verbal images with the dead-on certainty of phrase of a John Ashbery. He also does it without having to resort to Ashbery's often droning, lengthy verbosity.
My favorite thing about Ultima Thule is the sense of camraderie in McCombs's poetry. We journey into candlelit depths and to solitary gravesites. Yet we are not alone. The sense of brotherhood in these poems rivals the best of Whitman and Baudelaire.
Poe, Ashbery, Whitman and Baudelaire--these are some of my favorite poets. They are some of the greatest who ever lived. With Ultima Thule Davis McCombs joins their number.
Rating: 4
Summary: three years later, I still remember these poems
Comment: McCombs chiseled away at the cave rock and came up with an edifying, gorgeous metaphor. Formally rigorous but not mincing, the book even uses a historical voice for a third that doesn't clank. I'm from KY, but I don't know this poet as other reviewers may: still impressed, still remember the awe I first felt reading these, the cold drop, three years ago.
Rating: 5
Summary: An evocative collection
Comment: Davis McCombs's poems vividly evoke a strange and fantastic landscape. Kentucky's Mammoth Cave and the world above it are so fundamental to the narrator's voice and the poet's that it is as if all these elements are of a piece. What a tremendous debut!
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Title: Living in the Resurrection (Yale Series of Younger Poets, Vol 90) by Tony Crunk, James Dickey ISBN: 0300065264 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions (Yale Series of Younger Poets (Paper), No 95) by Maurice Manning, W. S. Merwin ISBN: 0300089988 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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