Ultima Thule
Reviewed by Craig Arnold, Fri., Aug. 4, 2000
Ultima Thule
by Davis McCombsYale University Press, 52 pp., $12 (paper); $19 hardback
Cutting across the strata of modern American poetry, the Yale Series of Younger Poets has been a kind of core sample, a way to track the shifting sands of poetic taste. If this year's volume -- 94th in the series -- is any indication, the newest generation of poets under 40 are ambitious of covering wider ground than their elders.
In his foreword to Davis McCombs' Ultima Thule, series judge W. S. Merwin identifies "the urge for a different scope from that of short poems standing by themselves," in books that feel composed rather than collected, "related to some single theme or subject or image." One might call this new poetry "fractal": a series that reiterates, in miniature, the contours of some larger pattern.
McCombs' "single theme or subject or image" is the Mammoth Caves complex in Kentucky, where the poet has been a park ranger. The book opens and closes with unrhymed sonnet sequences (set apart, oddly enough, by typeface) that present something like a guided tour of the caves. Those dark and sometimes deadly passages and grottoes are the book's master-metaphor, its map to any number of meanings. They are the unknown we are driven to explore and bring to light, a figure perhaps of the human unconscious, or of the body's own dark plumbing. At other times, they capture the drip and flow of time, preserving artifacts (and victims) as neatly as the dry air of a pharoah's tomb.
All of these possible avenues are charted in an account that is both historical and personal, in McCombs' own words, and in the persona of Stephen Bishop, the slave who explored much of the cavern in the mid-1800s and served as their first guide.
It has become commonplace for poets to assume the masks of obscure or made-up historical figures. Considering how history may be written by the winners, one might question the motives of a white, Ivy-League-educated writer in adopting the voice of a Black slave. Happily, McCombs' interest in Bishop seems less programmatic, stemming instead from the kinship of absorbing interest. John Hollander has written that mapping the terrain that one loves is a way of caressing it; and by passing the map to another pair of hands, McCombs is able to articulate an affection that might otherwise seem too familiar or comfortable. The plainness of his narrator's voice, its archaic diction, its quirky phrasings -- these strike us in the character of an autodidact, the self-taught afficionado who has his own ideas about things and isn't willing to submit them to the established order of knowledge.
That order is given expression here by the cave's (and the slave's) owner, Doctor Croghan. The most compelling passages of Ultima Thule reflect the tension between the two, Bishop playing Caliban to the Doctor's Prospero. "Theories I have learned/to keep from other, educated men," Bishop remarks, "lest they, like bats, fly shrieking at the torch-bearer." Elsewhere he laments the loss of an "Indian Mummy," whom the doctor sells to a "purveyor of traveling curiosities," only to be lost in a museum fire, "safe at last from looters, learned men." McCombs himself feels a similar impulse toward modern archaeologists:
... Do they ever stop, I've wondered, stare out
into the dark, and ask what brought us here,
all of us, what artifact will tell the future
of a longing wild and inarticulate,
of a dark place loved and gotten in the blood?
It's worth noting that the middle section of Ultima Thule, whose style and subject are less cavernous than the framing sequences, also offers some of the book's most affecting touches. Freed from the task of tourguide, and from the occasionally claustrophobic sonnet form, McCombs cascades into some wonderfully surreal associations of image: The poet's mother sews prom dresses with sequins that recall the scales of cleaned and gutted perch. His brother sneaks out at night to meet a girl, the tryst imagined "like finding a piano/in the barn, this possibility wide and tense as a storm." The almost cinematic montage of "Kentucky" moves swiftly from "the house quiet:/the porchswing and the pie/safe" to "blue corn, blue-/grass in wind, ocean/you once were."
But what stays with us is the admirable ambition of McCombs' underworld expedition, its mythic parable of how humanity responds to its environment. The tourist may ooh and ah, the owner may loot ruthlessly, but the guide feels in the vast circulatory system of limestone his own veins and arteries. The romantics would have called it the sublime, a shudder of respectful awe, all too close to terror:
It took four summers here for me to realize
the cave looped back under the Old Guide
Cemetery, that what was mortal floated
in a crust of brittle sandstone or leaked
into the darkest rivers and was caving still ...
McCombs imagines what lies unplumbed under our feet -- and then he leads us below, to invite us, even more awfully, to imagine all that presses down on our heads from above. Happy spelunking.
In 1998, Craig Arnold's first book of poetry, Shells, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He was recently awarded a Dobie Paisano writing fellowship.
