DISMAL ROCK

by Davis McCombs

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.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

Reviews

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in Davis McCombs's second collection are dark, that is they deal with the mysterious side of nature, which is to say they often concern caves, night-time encounters with the ghosts of wolves and Floyd Collins, night fishing, or the dreams and crepuscular visions of tobacco farmers watching their culture die. McCombs''s poetic line tends to be long, stately, and sensual, endstopped and often running to six stresses, as in these lines from "Ninevah," one of my favorites:

That night he camped alone among kudzu and yucca,
pitched the flickering egg of his tent on a shelf of sandstone
above the floodplain, above sinkholes and bottomland,
there where the laurels mesh into a railing, and where
the lights of Munfordville smudge the tree line to the west.

As was Ultime Thule ,these poems tend to be heavy with history and portent. As Kyle Churney says in Rain Taxi:

The weight of this history and tradition resonates throughout. McCombs does have a taste for the grand, often lamenting, poetic statement,

But all this said, the title Dismal Rock and the dramatic gray on black cover may be a bit misleading. Dismal Rock is the name of a piece of sandstone in Edmondson County, Kentucky, on the Nolin River. It’s popular with rock climbers. It’s located just about in the center of Kentucky, measuring from east to west. So I think it functions more as a place marker than a mood indicator.

Still Craig Beavens at Blackbird seems to think the rock is pretty dismal. He explains it's significance like this:

The overarching metaphor is established by the collection's title: A footnote tells us where Dismal Rock is, and that it has petroglyphs dating back -- several thousand years, -- but this iconic place is never confronted head-on, but lingers in the poems like a ghost, hovers in the background as a forbidding and mysterious force. The book’s meditations are imbued with this looming, gray rock in the distance -- a compelling strategy and an effective way to cast a shadow (pall?) over the proceedings. The “dismalness” of the Rock also speaks to the “hardness” of nature. These aren’t decorative landscapes or well-kept gardens, but the true facts of the physical world. The eponymous rock reminds us of one of the book’s central concerns: the ancientness and sacredness of the land.

I once heard James Baker Hall do a riff on the significance of caves in explaining why Kentucky produces so many fine poets. It had to do with the existence of all those dark caverns under the bright and verdant surface, the mystery of it. Like for example, the day my Daddy was mowing his ridge pasture and the earth suddenly fell away, engulfing the whole front end of his John Deere. We call these things sinkholes. We don''t always know where they are.

As a native of Kentucky, one who grew up in the tobacco culture, I am familiar with McCombs''s topography and don't need a footnote to explain about Floyd Collins, a man whose tragedy was the stuff of songs my mother sang to me. I am interested in McCombs as a poet of place, of my place, and I am maybe more aware than some of his poetic lineage. I see him as heir to an earlier generation of Kentucky poets who dwell on the mystery of the land: Robert Penn Warren, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Richard Taylor. It's a masculine list. I think Kentucky''s women poets are more pragmatic.

McCombs does his romantic sires proud. Listen to the music of "The Last Wolf in Edmondson County:"

Then I stood below the pedestal of Dismal Rock
as shadows straggled up like sheep from the river.
I wanted to believe his ghost might prowl among them,
that something of his hunger might still be limping
down a faint scent trail to its end, but I could not.

[Shaindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Davis McCombs seems like a literary wunderkind. Harvard undergrad, University of Virginia MFA, Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His first book, Ultima Thule, was a Yale Younger Poets selection. Dismal Rock, his second collection, won the Dorset Prize and the Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing. I can easily say all of these accolades are well-deserved.

What Davis does beautifully, that I hope to do, is write about rural places in a rich language that brings their beauty to everyone. The majority of this book is filled with poems about the tradition of tobacco farming in McCombs' home state of Kentucky, and the book is also an elegy of sorts for the loss of this way of life.

The poem "Rossetti in 1869" is one of the best poems I've ever read. Ever. It's no surprise it won the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award.

I really hope Davis likes my book as much as I like his because we traded signed copies rather than buying each other's books. Man, I hope he doesn't feel cheated.

[Elizabeth]

I loved "Ultima Thule," his first book, so much that I had to get this. I found here a similar poetic intelligence, and the tobacco poems were beautiful. Ultimately, though, my narrative yearnings were a bit frustrated -- I wanted the relation of the poet to the subject explored a bit more clearly/fully.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

14/31

The tobacco poems at the opening are really lovely and wonderful and evocative of Kentucky. But my favorite is the penultimate poem, "The Last Wolf in Edmonson County" about the slaughter of the last wolf in the county in 1902.

#SealeyChallenge #DavisMcCombs

From "The Last Wolf in Edmonson County"

I waited until the dark took everything,
but the sound of water; the spillway's troughs of stone,
the dam's thick plug. I waited where the blood spoor
of local narrative intersects a trail gone cold,
and what came stalking there was not a shade, though
it moved with stealth among the sawbriars, lit by nothing.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a nature lover, it pains me to say that, while the writing was fantastic, the poems did tend to lose my attention :(

[Travis Klunick · Rating 5 out of 5]

the imagery in this book is utterly astonishing