Ultima Thule

Yale Series of Younger Poets

by Davis McCombs

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. This collection 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'.

Genres: Poetry

69 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2000

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

They say write what you know, and Davis McCombs worked as a guide and park ranger at Mammoth Caves National Park for ten years! All the poems in this volume have to do with the caves in various ways with a few about the countryside above.

Anyone who has spent any time in a cave knows how different of a universe it is, seemingly unaffected by the world in the sunlight. McCombs captures the difference to an even greater degree because of how much time he has spent musing on the caves and their impact on people.

My favorites were the poems that connected the feeling and strangeness of the caves with his own experiences, such as:

Indian Mummy
Tours
Fame
Premonitions

You can hear Bottomless Pit read by the poet with some footage of the caves on Kentucky Life.

[W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by my college Poetry teacher, I just now got around to reading it.

[Jessica Freeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This week I began by re-reading Ultima Thule by Davis McCombs. First, I appreciate so much the subject matter of this book and the way he weaves stories throughout and in the poems. These poems fill me with possibility as a reader and writer and make poetry seem manageable in a way in which other writers don’t. When I am struggling most, he is one of the first poets I return to. The choice of subject matter is important to consider, and the way in which he uses history as part of the poems he writes today. This reminds me again and again of the Romantic poets and makes me consider what writers give an audience to hang onto and to weave through when reading. History combined with impeccable description of place really pull us in to his deep imagery. In a sense he could be related to the deep image poets, like Gallway Kinnell, and Merwin, etc. Because his images are so resonated, thick, and vibrating on the page. What makes us so able to access the image and to be transcended and, in the history, caves, and people of this book is the impeccable use of language and the economy of decoration. McCombs has what feels as almost an innate sense of how much to give and what little to keep back, which make the descriptions and figurative language he does use seem all the more powerful and assertive, which thereby gives the reader no opportunity to not be enveloped in the poems and transcended. It’s the particularity or the singularity of the image and lineation that makes these poems so incredibly accessible. It also reads to me as incredibly compassionate and passionate, for him to write of place in this manner. Giving life and respect to the history of land and man’s experience.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

While a strongly shaped collection, I'm left indifferent by the central metaphor of the cave. As "most beautiful when it come close/to absence" as McCombs gets with his poesy, it doesn't seem to exceed or diverge from the cavernous imaginary that has driven literature for as long as literature has been aware of caves. Perhaps its most durable poems bind this spelunker metaphysics to power: the archaeologists that "bend like surgeons" yet seem to never wonder "what artifact will tell the future/of a longing wild and inarticulate" line up with Stephen Bishop's largely inarticulate longing under the boot of the entrepreneurial slaver Doctor Croghan who owned Mammoth Cave.

There's an underlying (no pun intended) obsession with control that feels undernourished in exchange for, as Merwin notes in his foreword, "what informs the references, all of them, is the underworld." The idea of the "subaltern cannot speak" comes to mind- Bishop's experiences as "my pale inventions" and McCombs poetry like being "vigilant for his shadow in my own/his voice as it differed from the wind." In that sense it's very much a child of its time, though I wonder if by bending over it like a surgeon I'm artifacting it. Regardless, It's a smart collection made sturdy by the historical reliability of its central metaphor.

[Kasandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunningly good, perfectly crafted, interesting poems with compelling imagery and a wonderful sense of story and discovery. These required many re-reads apiece; most of the poems in the book are what I would call not only excellent, but "inevitable" -- tight and without a wasted word or misplaced phrase. Combs has a great sense of timing and place, and I'd love to read more of his work. No wonder this won the Yale Series of Younger Poets. I chose this book because it was chosen to win that year's competition by W.S. Merwin, whose work I greatly admire and enjoy. I was curious to know whether I'd agree with Merwin's taste. I do. These are not to be missed. Some of the best poems I've ever read in terms of craft and voice.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winner of the 2000 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Ultima Thule in medieval geographies denotes any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world." These poems are about Mammoth Cave, it's exploration in the mid-1800s by a slave who also served as a guide, McCombs's own experiences as a guide in the 1990s, and the four thousand-year human history of the longest cave system known in the world. In a deeper sense, it is about the exploration of human depths and the mysteries that lie below the surface of daily life.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dark and beautiful book of poems, many of which are set in and around the Mammoth Cave country of Kentucky (McCombs was himself a park ranger there). But not all. E.g., "Watermelons":

We wish we could read
lightning on our hide,
the unhysterical thump
of a talking drum:
do not trust the speed of beauty
do not trust the beauty

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read very little poetry, so it took me a long time to actually pick up this book. I was born in Mammoth Cave, KY and lived in the park for the first six months of life. My father worked in the park and my uncle was superintendent, so the subject matter is dear to me. Reading these poems makes me yearn to return and visit the park, which I haven't seen since the early eighties.

[Christian Kiefer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read some of this years ago and have returned to it now after a long absence. This one stands alongside Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares as a supreme achievement of the extended meditation on a subject. About as satisfying a book of poetry as one will find.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite of the Yale Younger Poets series books, but good work none the less. I doubt I will find a more original choice of subject matter anywhere.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kentucky has produced many wonderful poets, and quite a few of them write about the natural world. One of these poets is Davis McCombs, whose first book Ultima Thule examines the natural world from an unusual perspective: from underground.

McCombs used to work as a park ranger at Mammoth Cave. The first section of Ultima Thule is a sequence of sonnets from the point of view of Steven Bishop, a slave of one of the former owners of Mammoth Cave who not only guided visitors through it, but also discovered miles of passageways. The poems in this section are beautiful and haunting. "No one has ever come/ this far," the speaker says in the title poem:

"... I was drawn to wonder, the margins of the map.
Breath and a heartbeat. A fading lamp.
I was coffled to the light."

Other poems in the book explore the history and geology of cave country, life on a family farm, and MCombs's experience as a ranger. The language throughout is spare and musical.

I first read Ultima Thule a few years ago after visiting Mammoth Cave for the first time. Reading these poems helped me to reflect on Mammoth cave sites like the Star Chamber and the tuberculosis sanitarium, as well as on the cave's history. I especially recommend this book if you've been to Mammoth Cave, but if you haven't, you can let McCombs's poems guide you.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bias on the table: McCombs was one my teachers in my graduate program. That aside, his poetry I think is among the best in contemporary American poems. This book did not disappoint, illuminating the natural world and history of Kentucky, illustrating moments in a figure whose life is intricately connected to Mammoth Cave.

[Evan]

"I paddled the canoe
past soft mud banks and roots, leaned back,
and tried for once to take it all on faith:
the distant rookeries of stone, the farms
where sinkholes open like stigmata in the grass."

[Janna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Davis McCombs worked as a guide to the Kentucky Mammoth Cave, the world which Ultima Thule explores. W.S. Merwin, whom I love, chose this as the 1999 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, describing McCombs’ language in the foreword as “quiet, understated, delicate as a hand exploring a tunnel in the dark”. The “authenticity” of the collection “is deep in its language, not dependent on flash or effect: a grave, attentive holding of the light”.

McCombs writes in steady, even lines which are beautifully phrased and handled. His poems demand that the reader not only decelerate and take each careful line as it comes, but to realise that the poem and its scenes must be listened to, not simply understood. The placement of each word, the very feel of it, matter. Caves are dark things. The senses we rely on in the world above are dulled, and so one is forced to listen, to touch. McCombs has a talent for taking that sensation, spring-boarding off the actual setting of the cave, and then using it to explore life itself. That’s exactly what metaphors are meant to do, and the brilliance of McCombs is his ability to convey that through the very construction of the lines. His rhythm is fine-turned, his imagery tactile. It makes one aware of one’s embodiment and how we are not all intellect. This isn’t an argument to be made or a proposition to be learned, but rather a world to inhabit—and in that inhabitance, a truth to be experientially known.

The collection builds on itself, beginning first with imagining short scenes from the life of Steven Bishop, a slave who acted as a guide to the Cave and discovered many areas within it. We get to know the cave, the river, its circumstances. These quickly branch out into later times and stories of other people, including McCombs himself, in rural environments. ‘April Fifth, Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Three’ is a particularly spare and robust picture of a family with a farm under great stress due to sudden changes in the river and weather. Again, that sense of physicality and musicality animates it. It’s like a painting done in a few quick strokes, and that’s in part achieved through the river we met in earlier poems, coming through as a thread of continuity in time and place, an artery through the cave and back into sunlight.

There’s so much more that I’m sure I skimmed over, not being quite up to the challenge of a holistic reading across the entire collection, like this. But I’m grateful that it has reminded me of the need to closely read and consider, and it has begun teaching me to do so again and to slow down in life itself and take greater notice of myself, of my surroundings. One thing that McCombs does finely is to speed up or drag out time depending on what he’s conjuring or conveying. It seems to me that what really matters in time is our experience of it. I recently learned that moving around more prevents us from ageing because it gives out signals that are absent when we’re sedentary — it reminds our body that we’re here and we shouldn’t deteriorate. Reading slowly and meaningfully through McCombs’ explorations feels like a signal to the mind and also the body that I’m here, I’m totally and completely here, and I want to live. He asks in ‘Cave Mummies’:

“… what brought us here,
all of us, what artifact will tell the future
of a longing wild and inarticulate,
of a dark place loved and gotten in the blood?”

The writings of those who explore and make themselves fully alive to the world are perhaps a strong candidate. The project of the collection, what it can teach, what it imparts, and even the stories which are themselves told seem to all be summed up in the final lines of ‘The River and Under the River’:

“Tonight the river is at work dissolving, solving
over and over the riddle of its loosening.
I want to know how to hear it, and what it might teach me:
how to inhabit this thing of bone, gut, and blood,
this part of me that would not vanish if I vanished.”

[Stefan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another member of faculty at Arkansas wrote this book. Although well-written and precisely crafted, this work failed to reel me in and take me out of myself.

[Apoorva · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent collection. But it takes a lot more to punch me in the guts and earn 4 or 5 stars.