Ultima Thule

by Davis McCombs; Foreword by W.S. Merwin

• ISBN13: 9780300083170
• ISBN10: 0300083173
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2000-03-11
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

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 stave 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.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
W. S. Merwin
Acknowledgments	xiii
I. ULTIMA THULE
Candlewriting	3	(1)
Star Chamber	4	(1)
Visitations	5	(1)
Bottomless Pit	6	(1)
Echo River	7	(1)
Shadow World	8	(1)
Cartography	9	(1)
Cave Formation	10	(1)
Doctor Croghan	11	(1)
Brush Fire	12	(1)
Indian Mummy	13	(1)
The Church	14	(1)
Dripstone	15	(1)
Tuberculosis Sanitarium	16	(1)
Tours	17	(1)
River	18	(1)
The Others	19	(1)
Fame	20	(1)
Ultima Thule	21