Sherry Chandler » Dismal Rock
Dismal Rock
The poems in Davis McCombs’s second collection are dark, that is they deal with the mysterious side of nature, which is to say they often concern caves, night-time encounters with the ghosts of wolves and Floyd Collins, night fishing, or the dreams and crepuscular visions of tobacco farmers watching their culture die. McCombs’s poetic line tends to be long, stately, and sensual, endstopped and often running to six stresses, as in these lines from “Ninevah,” one of my favorites:
That night he camped alone among kudzu and yucca,
pitched the flickering egg of his tent on a shelf of sandstone
above the floodplain, above sinkholes and bottomland,
there where the laurels mesh into a railing, and where
the lights of Munfordville smudge the tree line to the west.
As was Ultime Thule, these poems tend to be heavy with history and portent. As Kyle Churney says in Rain Taxi:
The weight of this history and tradition resonates throughout. McCombs does have a taste for the grand, often lamenting, poetic statement,
But all this said, the title Dismal Rock and the dramatic gray on black cover may be a bit misleading. Dismal Rock is the name of a piece of sandstone in Edmondson County, Kentucky, on the Nolin River. It’s popular with rock climbers. It’s located just about in the center of Kentucky, measuring from east to west. So I think it functions more as a place marker than a mood indicator.
Still Craig Beavens at Blackbird seems to think the rock is pretty dismal. He explains the rock’s significance like this:
The overarching metaphor is established by the collection’s title: A footnote tells us where Dismal Rock is, and that it has petroglyphs dating back “several thousand years,” but this iconic place is never confronted head-on, but lingers in the poems like a ghost, hovers in the background as a forbidding and mysterious force. The book’s meditations are imbued with this looming, gray rock in the distance—a compelling strategy and an effective way to cast a shadow (pall?) over the proceedings. The “dismalness” of the Rock also speaks to the “hardness” of nature. These aren’t decorative landscapes or well-kept gardens, but the true facts of the physical world. The eponymous rock reminds us of one of the book’s central concerns: the ancientness and sacredness of the land.
I once heard James Baker Hall do a riff on the significance of caves in explaining why Kentucky produces so many fine poets. It had to do with the existence of all those dark caverns under the bright and verdant surface, the mystery of it. Like for example, the day my Daddy was mowing his ridge pasture and the earth suddenly fell away, engulfing the whole front end of his John Deere. We call these things sinkholes. We don’t always know where they are.
As a native of Kentucky, one who grew up in the tobacco culture, I am familiar with McCombs’s topography and don’t need a footnote to explain about Floyd Collins, a man whose tragedy was the stuff of songs my mother sang to me. I am interested in McCombs as a poet of place, of my place, and I am maybe more aware than some of his poetic lineage. When Beavins comments on the sparsity of “old-fashioned nature poets,” I’d invite him to come to Kentucky. I see MCCombs as heir to an earlier generation of Kentucky poets who dwell on the mystery of the land: Robert Penn Warren, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Richard Taylor. It’s a masculine list. I think Kentucky’s women poets are more pragmatic.
McCombs does his romantic sires proud. Listen to the music of “The Last Wolf in Edmondson County:”
Then I stood below the pedestal of Dismal Rock
as shadows straggled up like sheep from the river.
I wanted to believe his ghost might prowl among them,
that something of his hunger might still be limping
down a faint scent trail to its end, but I could not.
Following on his 1999 Yale Younger Poets prize for Ultime Thule, McCombs has raked up an impressive list of awards for Dismal Rock.. It won the 2005 Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, 2008 Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry, the 2007 Kentucky Literary Award, and was chosen by Contemporary Poetry Review as the best second book of 2007.
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