Dismal Rock Author:Davis McCombs The award-winning poet Davis McCombs revisits the landscape of his youth on the tobacco farms of Kentucky in this insightful collection of verse. Initially chronicling events in local and family history, the poems in this book soon widen in scope until they include subjects as diverse as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Elgin Marbles, John Keats, Bob... more » Marley, fatherhood, and fishing. The author's lens is kaleidoscopic, and yet his poems coalesce around important themes that never lose sight of the specific and the personal. Several poems in this volume explore the grief McCombs feels over the loss of local culture as it resonates within the broader context of ecological destruction, imbuing the global with the undeniably personal. The poems in this collection are intimate and real, visceral and immediate, as if McCombs were haunted by them and had no alternative but to give them voice. Currently director of the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas, Davis McCombs attended Harvard University and the University of Virginia and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lilly Poetry Foundation, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry 1996, The Missouri Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and his first book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was also the winner of the 2005 Dorset Prize.« less