Armored Hearts: Selected & New Poems

by David Bottoms

Armored Hearts , combining new poems and a selection from previous volumes, offers the power of idiomatic narrative at its naked best. "It is refreshing to read a poet who is not obliquely vague, who tells a story cleanly and convincingly, and yet who will not close down mysterious and complicated things about life that simply defy such closure."-- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Genres: Poetry

150 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Ken]

This volume selects best poems from three previous Bottoms collection and then adds new ones under the book's title "Armored Hearts." By new, we mean 1995, as this has been out for a long while and David Bottoms is sadly no more.

Anyway, you can see him evolve over time. The first collection selected from is called Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump and typifies the rather punk gloom you see in the title poem below:


Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump

Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride
to the dump in carloads
to turn our headlights across the wasted field,
freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish.

Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still
like dead beer cans.
Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow
into garbage, hide in old truck tires,
rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the
mounds,
or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light
toward the darkness at the edge of the dump.

It's the light they believe kills.
We drink and load again, let them crawl
for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.


Violent as hell, but as a poem rather amazing the way it jumps into compelling action so seamlessly. And the last stanza, especially it's first and last line. Poets would kill to think up lines like that. Well,, writhe, maybe, or make a deal with the devil before recalling the darkness they're headed for.

Here's another I admired from the same debut collection of Bottoms':


The Christmas Rifle

Over the spine of the ridge
orange light scatters through pine and briar,
sifts into the gorge.
With the red glove of his right hand
my father points toward a branch near the top of a pine,
raises the sawed-off stock to my shoulder, lifts
the barrel and backs away.

The gray squirrel moves in front of the sun,
and light shoots down the barrel like a ricochet,
turns blued steel silver from bead to sight.
He points again
and I follow the dark green sleeve of his jacket
to his red outstretched finger
to the squirrel crouched in the fork where the branch
joins the trunk.

Don't jerk. Don't pull. And I watch that spot of air
where the gray squirrel jumps,
then drops from limb to limb in stiff gymnastics
until it strikes the ground at the foot of the pine.
I cradle the rifle and walk to the squirrel, prod
the soft belly with the barrel, study
the hole over the left shoulder, the fine gray hair,
white near the roots, puffed out around a circle of blood.
Just behind me, my father is walking on needles,
the weight of his hand comes down on my shoulder.


The unexpected details about the squirrel on the ground spell r-e-g-r-e-t in so many ways. And the weight of his father's hand... the burden of "becoming a man" the way the father did.

It's one of those poems where the title speaks louder after the reading, too.

The other collections showed Bottoms' precision with language, too, and were certainly worth the reading, but these early ones, though tough subjects, really hit home in ways "Roses are red, violets are blue" poems don't.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read David Bottoms in 1981 when his collection entitled Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump was published. I remember the comment Robert Penn Warren made about the poems: the tang of actuality whets his compelling rhythms.

Bottoms is a straightforward and clear poet. His poems are mostly mini stories infused with unexpected insights. They are uncomplicated, observational, and conversational. I find his early poems stronger than his later poems, perhaps because I always felt Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump to be such a strong and self-contained work.

[Carmen von Rohr · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars because David Bottoms has a beautiful command of language. The substance of his work, however, leaves much to be desired. It's all fishing and snakes and boats (seriously, I think every other poem featured a jon boat and a copperhead) and tedious, boring masculinity. Women pretty much only show up in his poems to be raped, to serve men beer or food, or as prostitutes. And the one poem that touched on an issue of racial justice showed sympathy for white men while erasing people of color. Gross.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poet Laureate for the State of Georgia. Wonderful poems often writing about the day to day life activities that one encounters and recording them in short one to two page poems. Favorite poems from the book include: Under the Vulture-Tree, Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt, and Sierra Bear. A very enjoyable read!