Charlottesville Words

New Dominion Bookshop will host Tupelo Press poets

Davis McComb (Dismal Rock) and Michael Chitwood (Spill)

for readings and book-signings on

Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 5:30 pm

Davis McComb’s Dismal Rock was the winner of the $10,000 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. “This beautiful book records the sacraments of labor and the dark equivocations of history in a single swath of tobacco land in south central Kentucky. With infinite patience and luminous particularity, Davis McCombs unearths the traces of those-who-have-passed-before-us through the material world. How rare it is to encounter a writer—to encounter any human being—who finds the world more compelling than the self. McCombs is just such a paragon. And his poems have the weight of psalms.” —Linda Gregerson, Judge of the $10,000 Dorset Prize.

The book’s first section, “Tobacco Mosaic,” chronicles the disappearing culture of white burley tobacco farming in south central Kentucky. Since the time of Native Americans, white burley tobacco has been cultivated in the long, humid growing seasons of Kentucky. Suddenly, in one generation, that highly specialized, largely unmechanized, intimate way of farming and the culture that grew around it have begun to disappear. These poems reverberate with the loss of this unique way of life.

The subject of ecological destruction returns in the book’s second section as well, more globally. Other poems deal with topics as diverse as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Elgin Marbles, John Keats, Bob Marley, fatherhood, fishing and local and familial history, as well as the ways in which the caves of the area shape the lives of the people who live above them.

Davis McCombs, a Yale Younger Poets Award winner selected by W.S. Merwin, directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas. He attended Harvard University, the University of Virginia (MFA), and Stanford University as Wallace Stegner Fellow. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lilly Poetry Foundation, and the Kentucky Arts Council.

Michael Chitwood’s Spill is “a profoundly moving, clear seeing, utterly accomplished song of praise for the world in all its mutable and evanescent glory. Spill is a beautiful book, heart breaking, funny, keenly observed—more evidence for those who need it that Michael Chitwood is one of America’s finest poets.” — Alan Shapiro

Spill’s central concern is for the “thin” places in our world where views of the other side might be glimpsed, fleetingly, out the corner of the eye. The book is divided into three sections that progress from mystery through spiritual questioning to a place where the soul and the body are not meshed but are, at least, at ease in the other’s company.

The first section is a third person account of a childhood in which the child is surrounded by evangelical cer­tainty but is already seeing that the mystery and miracle of the physical world question that certainty. The totem animal of this section is the dog with his nose for the invisible.

The second section follows the path of the pilgrim. Sometimes the path meanders near old snow with its chill breath and sometimes it is a brick sidewalk from which the traveler sees the figure of the prophesied one in the quick and killing talons of a red-tailed hawk. This section arrives finally at a still moment of baptism, but it is a baptism that contains the possibility of death.

In the final section, the speaker is trying to understand where the road has led. It hasn’t led to certainty but the speaker seems to discover that that wasn’t the direction it was ever headed in. The holy is popping up in out-of-the-way places and when least expected. There’s joy in that, and solace. And there are still questions to be asked.

Michael Chitwood is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including The Weave Room, Salt Works, From Whence and Whet, and the essay collections Hitting Below the Bible Belt and Finishing Touches. A Virginian, he received his BA from Emory & Henry College in Emory, VA and then worked as a science writer and editor. He earned his MFA from the University of Virginia and subsequently moved to North Carolina where he is a visiting lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For more information, go to http://www.tupelopress.org

or contact Jean Cavenas at jcavenas@tupelopress.org

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