Ultima Thule

Description

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 and which is home to thousands of caves. The book 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. CONTENTS FOREWORD ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I . ULTIMA THULE Candlewriting Star Chamber Visitations Bottomless Pit Echo River Shadow World Cartography Cave Formation Doctor Croghan Brush Fire Indian Mummy The Church Dripstone Tuberculosis Sanitarium Tours River The Others Fame Ultima Thule II. THE RIVER AND UNDER THE RIVER Ponds Salts Cave Cave Wind Moonbow Sinking Stream Floyd’s Lost Passage Kentucky April Fifth, Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Three Watermelons Freemartin Flowstone The River and Under the River III. THE DARK COUNTY Dismantling the Cave Gate June Farming Broken Country Solution Cave Premonitions Comet Hale-Bopp Pushing a Lead Stephen Bishop’s Grave Cave Mummies