Dismal Rock: Poetry That Captures a Fading World

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — An award-winning collection of poetry by Davis McCombs uses the language and terrain of the burley tobacco country of south-central Kentucky to reveal the complexities of a fading way of life. McCombs’ book, Dismal Rock, was recently published by Tupelo Press.

The book received the 2005 Dorset Prize for poetry, which includes a cash award of $10,000 and subsequent publication by Tupelo Press.

Linda Gregerson, the judge who selected Dismal Rock for the Dorset Prize, wrote that it “records the sacraments of labor and the dark equivocations of history.” Citing McCombs’ particularity in unearthing the past, she continued: “How rare it is to encounter a writer — to encounter any human being — who finds the world more compelling than the self.”

McCombs, who directs the programs in creative writing and translation at the University of Arkansas, grew up near Mammoth Cave in a family that had raised tobacco for generations. He knows burley tobacco farming as both “an unmechanized, hands-on, very intimate process” and as “a quagmire of moral and ethical dilemmas.”

He refers to the dilemmas in “Nicotiana,” which begins with a young man being told that tobacco had paid for his education and ends with “He thinks of the words he writes, of the dark like silt / beneath them, and of the secret hiding like a crayfish there.”

In “Hobart,” McCombs introduces a farmer smoking by the tailgate of his truck and anticipating rain — but not the larger storm that would take his way of life: “He played the barn vents at curing time / like the stops of an instrument, and went on, cupping / his hands around the life he’d inherited as if it were a flame.”

“Hobart” is included in “Tobacco Mosaic,” a set of 16 poems that begin Dismal Rock. McCombs evokes a place that is nearly gone through the common language of its people, as in the poem “Lexicon”: “At the Depot Market, they say blue mold, high color; / they are nodding and saying sucker dope; they are leaning / on the counter and talking about Black Patch, high boys, flue-cured. / They are arguing about horn worms and buyouts. / They are saying come back, come back, come back.”

The Dismal Rock of the title is a massive sandstone outcropping in Edmonson County, Ky. In McComb’s work, it looms as a place and a place name, sometimes outlined with snow, sometimes defining the horizon. At times it is the site of loss, as in “The Last Wolf in Edmonson County,” which refers to the shooting in 1902 of the last gray wolf in the area at the base of Dismal Rock.

Dismal Rock is McCombs’ second collection of poetry. His first book, Ultima Thule, was a Yale Younger Poets Award winner, selected by W.S. Merwin. McCombs is an associate professor and directs the programs in creative writing and translation in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas.