Vagrant Grace: Poems

by David Bottoms

David Bottoms has a breathtaking ability to capture human tenderness, vulnerability, and cruelty in the brief turn of a line. Grounded in the contemporary South, his poems often witness people in their moments of failure, as their fantasies and families collapse around them, as they weep at gravesides, as they recognize their own fading image in the bathroom mirror. "One cannot read Bottoms without being nerve-touched by his sardonic yet compassionate country-man's voice, his hunter's irony."- James Dickey David Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump , was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry , and The Paris Review , as well as in numerous anthologies. He is author of several books of poetry as well as two novels. Among his other awards are the Levinson Prize, an Ingram-Merrill Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. An avid guitarist and fisherman, he divides his time between Georgia and Montana.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1999

Reviews

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Bottoms - for decades - is my favorite poet. He died in early March, just before my mother died.
His poems are rich and sometimes strange, often spiritual.
Here, he tells of family members, of growing up in Canton, Georgia, and the rest of Georgia and the fishing and growing and visiting there. He was the Poet Laureate of Georgia for a nice long stretch, but I found him in his early books.
He just was amazing in his poems. His publisher features him here: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/aut...
Here is one of the poems from Vagrant Grace, courtesy of Copper Canyon and the Poetry Foundation (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

A Walk to Carter’s Lake
BY DAVID BOTTOMS
Look, above the creek, hummingbirds in the trumpet vine.
Not too close, wait. See the green blurs
stitching the leaves?

Here at the edge of the millennium
I don’t imagine
you’d call them anything as archaic as angels.

But aren’t they agents of a sort, and secret,
dissolving and solidifying,
spying from their constantly shifting perches of air,
always nervous
of us, risking only a stab
in a bell of petals?

Don’t look so stunned, lay your pack
in the needles and catch a breath. I know,
you thought you knew me,
and now to hear me talk this way ...

I’m glad I’ve stopped pretending
to love people
and the cities where people can’t love themselves.
This is what the quiet accomplishes,
and the water trusting
the shadows to eventually peel back to the trees.

Small wonder the angels are said to despise us.
Still, without them
how do we account for our meanness?

Look at that, what else can promenade
in the air? And how easily
they’re alarmed,
revving off into the mist.

David Bottoms, “A Walk to Carter’s Lake” from Vagrant Grace. Copyright 1999 by David Bottoms. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Vagrant Grace: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)

You can find more Bottoms courtesy of the Poetry Foundation, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

Highest recommendation. God rest our man David Bottoms.

[Cindy Cunningham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had read this book many years ago, but picked it back up again recently. I love how Bottoms can wrap up his poems so nicely, present questions that not many writers could get away with, and juxtapose haunting imagery.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bottoms' 1999 collection of poems was good, but I didn't find it nearly as good as either of the two later collections that I had read. As he did there, he was exploring his Southern cultural and personal roots, but the poems don't seem as focused.