Robert W. Hill
Department of English
Kennesaw State University
1000 Chastain Road
Kennesaw GA 30144-5591

Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1999): 80-84.

Early in David Bottoms' career, it was easy but wrong to identify him as a shit-kicking would-be cowboy from Bibb County, Georgia, a mimic of James Dickey with a gift for narrative, an eye for detail, and a boyishly (though beardedly) appealing blues-bluegrass riskiness, a picaroon. Some people in Macon think he actually did vandalize Rose Hill Cemetery as described in "Wrestling Angels" (3) though he insists that he did not. The fact is that Bottoms is from Canton, Georgia, reared in a middle-class family on the dwindling, receding periphery of the rural, less than an hour's drive from downtown Atlanta, and his poetry is a remarkable record of the confluence of rural and urban-suburban currents in the contemporary South.

In the poem "Armored Hearts" (113) we see the narrator's reluctance to watch all the ramifications of domesticating the wild. He wants a pond in his subdivision; he wants living creatures in and around it. But he prefers loggerhead turtles to ducks, and he retaliates against the pistol-packing neighbor who shoots from a tree at the turtles. The narrator's sense of suburban claustrophobia is made clear as he fears, or actually hears, bullets ricocheting in the direction of his house. No matter how neighborly the shooter might be otherwise (there is no gunfight, as Bottoms likes to evoke momentarily)--no matter how neighborly, the other guy's view of nature in the suburbs is to have ducks; the poet's view is to let the turtles kill. Both men are caught in homemade manipulations of the environment for very temporary results.

In a National Public Radio interview, Victor Nunez, director and screenwriter of Ulee's Gold, said it was the writer's job "to explore what's left of place when it's not all there anymore." He was referring to his own background as half first-generation American and half long-term resident of North Florida. His point was both pragmatic and imaginative (speaking as an artist), morally responsive, but reluctantly so (speaking as a citizen). He would give us people living in--caught in--places where flux is pervasive, where unanticipated cultures crop up and grow, shifting, breaking old soil, riving old pathways and settled hearts; those people are the source of the writer's strength, the source and treasure-house of humane adaptability. Nunez would not argue that the synthesis is easy nor that it is universally good. His comment clearly implies some regret at what may have been lost ("what's left of place when it's not all there anymore"), but his perspective as an artist has deepened as he has assimilated others' experiences into his own.

Nunez' comments triggered yet again for me a recognition that the sort of "quiet desperation" people experience nowadays is unlike Thoreau's in mid-nineteenth-century New England. That is, Thoreau's "desperate men" were struggling with tried-and-true spiritual conflicts, the kind that pits flesh against spirit, selfishness against social responsibility, Gradgrindian "Facts!" against the claims of the imaginative soul. But they were doing it within a relatively homogeneous society, certainly by our standards. Thoreau's protests were mounted against the sorts of dangers that romantics always mount against--institutional power, doctrinal tyrannies, materialism, the simple staving-off of mortality as we wind along, more and more distant from innocently insightful childhood, from our finer instincts that might be fostered by poetical attention to nature.

But Thoreau never saw Atlanta's I-285 at Spaghetti Junction at rush hour. He missed out on variously named exoduses to the suburbs--white flight, bright flight, "right flight" (thinking of Gingrichian Republicans, I made that one up), and other millennialist flights yet to be named. The people in the world Thoreau describes may have had newspapers and the Post Office for him to warn against, but THIS?--these cell phones, faxes, internet, search engines that may find us hunched up with one shoulder to our ear and satellite-mapped voices telling us to go back go back, we missed our turn. This world is in such constant change, such radical uprooting, such endemic eclecticism, such pervasive mixing and matching, that old admonitions to simplifysimplifysimplify may not catch the tone, walk the walk, see the bottom line that our complex, dangerous, contemporary American--even Southern--living requires.

When Armored Hearts appeared in late 1995, a much wider readership could see David Bottoms' genuinely complex view of the rural and suburban, a traditional but dynamic philosophy that he repeatedly tests against the realities of the contemporary world, a world in which even the most rural can hardly escape television's almost unmediated channeling of "out there" to "in here," from them to us.

Situated in the suburbs, aspiring to some idea or memory of the peace and order of the pastoral rural, somewhat world-weary and regretful, Bottoms seeks a place not isolated--oppressed--by mass, urban society. His poems do not rage against the shallow materialism of suburban; they imply as much. They do not mount bitter tirades against the loss of the old ways; they meditate and memorialize. And they are not neo-Fugitive; they are firmly grounded in the contemporary. These poems mark the reality of the contemporary South even as they momentarily--consciously momentarily--remind us of rural values, such as loyalty, solidity, industriousness, and reverence, and they place us spiritually among the trees and waters. For Bottoms is irrepressibly human. He doesn't transform us into other creatures, as Dickey does and Ted Hughes tries to do, but he absolutely does bring us face to face with creatures of nature--bears, wolves, fish, ducks, vultures.

Bottoms' work is centered in the country, not only in non-human nature, where peace may be visited among rural people. From the safety of, and another kind of isolation in, the suburbs, the poet may observe, pick and choose from among forces of extinction, high passions, religious ecstasies--all from which to pick and choose--to be a snake-handler or not, a runner-away in a U-Haul or not, a poet or not.

His narrative, poetical fulcrum has always been the human (and more so now as he considers the impact of urban, suburban, and rural values upon his young daughter); therefore, when he writes about nature, he marks the trail back to human condition. In "My Perfect Night" (139), for instance, he shuts the door of a "dark house" to which we know he'll return; and the wolf who wanders onto the scene "To lick dew off a stone" is faced with "extinction," not only the simple death of all things but also the extinction implied by human encroachment.

When Bottoms won the 1979 Walt Whitman Prize for his first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, Robert Penn Warren, the contest judge, observed that those poems set the protagonist in the position of observer, a human seeker after "illumination." Warren was rarely wrong in what he saw in poetry, calling Bottoms "temperamentally a realist," not a transformer, not a transmogrifier. He doesn't enter the natural world, letting it possess him in some atavistic urge to magical power.

Bottoms seeks peace more than roiling energies, order more than demiurgic chaos, confirmation more than cosmic questioning. Bluntly, while Dickey often proclaimed himself to have a "religion of sticks and stones," Bottoms is profoundly a Christian poet, with almost medieval scholastic impulses to understand without cashing in his heart, to make sense without presuming to be God. It is ludicrous to think of Bottoms even considering to write something as thunderously challenging to created heavens as Dickey's The Zodiac.

In "Occurrence in the Big Sky" (in Poetry magazine's eighty-fifth anniversary issue), Bottoms delineates in three sections some of his most persistent ideas about the clarity and solidity of rural values, including signs of mournfulness and isolation, particularly of women in those settings. The poem begins with details of a log house left unfinished or unrepaired by a man who has died. But the house is now--like it or not--finished, finally expressed as far as it shall be to the woman--probably his widow--who remains. "Logs uncaulked, walls all stud / and rough board, plumbing dangling like loose bones" recall Theodore Roethke's greenhouse poems, "Cuttings I," "Cuttings II," and others, whose animated roots loll obscenely in stinking dirt but foreshadow growth in their profusion. Bottoms' opening scene bares the guts of this lone house; "the faucet ticks" while "the wind rakes," and the "old woman with a weak heart . . . / ponders the congested emptiness, at a loss / among hammer and power saw, chisel blade and level." Church people appear fleetingly in one line, "late with her supper," so the mourner's isolation is nearly perfect (7).

The little monodrama is rural, all right, even bleak, but this opening section bears the burden of rural thingness, of the presence of physical things, physical acts--even those not completed, only potential, intended. As the widow memorializes her loss, she does so by cataloguing the things around her in the room where she sits: deadbolts, "an overturned Thermos," a handkerchief, a sawhorse, "an unlaced boot," etc. One could say that she does not remember him, only his things, but they bear him still. Her section ends as she "dreads the cleaning out of closets, / the smell of old shirts" (7).

Part Two ponders the condition of the dead man's spirit, where it is, how it must feel, what it must wonder about, but pondering takes the form of simple speculation, declaration, not mystical immersion. That sort of magical realism is not the rural world that Bottoms knows. Spirit is real but it isn't messily blending and dissolving into some Oversoul or other. His narrator speculates, "how hard for the soul / to put down the hammer, to understand the last nail / is never driven." He wonders at the wonder a soul must feel who must "brush off desire / and responsibility." "How dizzy the soul must be, / floating in that first violent gust of timelessness," he says. "How it must [want] . . . something as solid as a bar of chocolate / or a hand across a table." And finally, to close the section, he declares, "Still the soul / must grow happy singing under the hill / in that network of roots" (8).

In Section Three, having parsed out the widow's grief and puzzlement and the possible or likely adjustment, or coping, of the dead man's soul, the poet turns to an emblem in the Big Sky of his title, where he sees "something . . . like a page from Revelation" (8), two birds in flight tugging at a snake, balled up, dropped, unraveling, flailing, "a few seconds of horror, or ecstasy, / or beauty, / before an eagle plunged / and caught it, rose and broke the clouds" (9).

While Robert Penn Warren once spoke of Bottoms as "waiting for the world to speak to him," this poem suggests more that he waits for his thoughts and feelings, his imagination, to gather force and apply to the world--lay on the world--what makes sense. Bottoms is more akin to Elizabeth Bishop in "At the Fishhouses" or Wallace Stevens in "The Idea of Order at Key West" than to James Dickey in "Encounter in the Cage Country" or Gerard Manley Hopkins in "The Windhover." Bottoms' explosions of spirit are tempered, mediated through the poetry. As Joel Connaroe shrewdly observed, this poet is "clearly a meticulous craftsman whose highest pleasure is not in shooting rats or gigging frogs or killing squirrels . . . but in finding a language, supple and evocative, to communicate the implications of these experiences" (4).

Now this is not to say that Bottoms raises no troubling metaphysical questions, but they are less directed at God and the universe than they are at himself, at people rather than principalities and powers of the air. In the mostly tired-sounding movie Contact, Tom Skerritt's ambitious sonofabitch character says to Jody Foster's Jody Foster character something like "It's too bad, but that's the way the world is," and Jody Foster responds, "I always thought the world was what we made it."

David Bottoms is realist enough to know that Tom Skerritt speaks the truth, but he's a seeker after truth enough and increasingly a father wanting the world to be better for his daughter enough that he tries to believe the peace, the order, the spiritual presence, the confirmation that may be perceived or created in close encounters with the world of society which is set down like an exotic plant in the midst of reformed, domesticated nature--a place we call the suburbs. There he can pause, observe, regroup his spirit, mind, and poetry, thereby setting at least some small part of the universe right, the world as he can make it, guided by scenes and senses carried from Canton, the rural in transition.

At a conference on "Writing the Rural" at Brewton-Parker College, Robert Morgan spoke of his youthful desire to get away from a literal one-horse farm in the Blue Ridge at least partly because of the "violence and meanness" he saw in the people who lived there. "Farming doesn't guarantee you'll be a good person." James Dickey has said, "In poems I can be a better man than I am." For David Bottoms, poems are a soul-tending way--one might say almost a religious way--to have a better world--rural, urban, and suburban--than we actually do.

In "A Home Buyer" (135) the poet begins, "I was so glad to be living in my own house again," where he walks, "exploring / my pond of ivy, shadows of maple and dogwood," and we recall Ralph Waldo Emerson's narrator in "Hamatreya," who proclaims his ownership of my land, my hills, my dog, but whose legitimate deeds are overturned by the Earth's Song of universal mortal cycles.

In "In Heritage Farms, Settled" (82), Bottoms' narrator views the suburban world as it settles, is settling, and therefore is threatening his spiritual relationship with "whole colonies of mushrooms, the stinkhorns, / the devil's urns," his earnest--if not desperate--search for the creek's "cargo / of debris," for things "small and changing, / the delicate white maggot," the tadpole, the hornworm, the phoenix moth. Such seeking for nature in the apparently heartless heart of the suburbs reiterates itself throughout Bottoms' poetry, at least since Shooting Rats, and stands as a testimony to the persistent clarity of image and the desire for truth this poet possesses.

But home ownership is ambiguous as a virtue, as well, for homes must be maintained, at great cost, including psychic cost:

Then one night two policemen knock
on your door and show you your hands, swollen, bloody,
show you the battered plaster
of your bedroom wall. ("Home Maintenance" 120)

This chilling story of a frustrated , violent man--homo domestica-- is one of many signs in Bottoms' poetry that issues of house, home, and family in today's world are unresolved--as they always are--and that those moments of temporary resolution, beauty, peace, and grace are very much moments. I hesitate to invoke T.S. Eliot's Waste Land--"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"--but the glimpses of rural, of urban that intersect and mediate the world of the suburbs are a major contribution by this poet--one who seeks and memorializes the warbling of nature but who also hears at his back, through the loose screens, doors, and partitions of his suburban home, TV's cabled "chariot hurrying near."

Finally, to recall the poet's pursuit of the world, society, and the self, his effort to make or discover meaning, I close with the last lines of "Last Nickel Ranch: Plains, Montana" (124):

I know what I've valued.
Last night I heard a coyote howling off the ridge
and went to the window.
In the darkness behind the glass
I saw myself, and behind my eyes the stars flew
into the pines.

David Bottoms takes in the real world--as transcendent as it is, not as he desires it to be or forces it through art to be. He sees it, wherever he lives, and sings it to us for our lives.

Works Cited

Bottoms, David. Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper, 1995.

---. "Occurrence in the Big Sky." Poetry 171.1(Oct.-Nov.1997): 7-9.

Connaroe, Joel. Rev. In a U-Haul North of Damascus. Washington Post Book World. 7 Aug. 1983: 4.

Morgan, Robert. Panel discussion on "Writing the Rural." Brewton-Parker College. 14 Oct. 1997.

Nunez, Victor. Interview. All Things Considered. Natl. Public Radio. 25 June 1997.

Roethke, Theodore. Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.

Warren, Robert Penn. Dust jacket. Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, by David Bottoms. New York: Morrow, 1980.