Book Description

In these 14 poems, David Bottoms waltzes through the "Christ-haunted South" and highlights how and where the afterlife intersects our daily lives. In a strong and musical voice, Bottoms, the poet laureate of Georgia, modernizes the narrative traditions of the American South. He encounters the ghosts of musicians and recounts strange instances of religious visitation:

From "Vigilance":

Like my neighbor again who grew a yellow rose
wilted with the sign of the cross, or his sister in Biloxi
who once saw the virgin swimming
in a bowl of vegetable soup.
Accolades, yes, to Ramona Barreras
of Phoenix, Arizona, who pulled from her oven
in 1977
a tortilla scorched with the face of Christ,
which may or may not
have been the face that appeared
some ten years later in Bras D'Or
on an outside wall of a Tim Horton's Restaurant,
though both made the papers
and drew their share of pilgrims.

"What does it mean," Bottoms asks, "that God keeps stamping his image on pastry and French toast, on biscuits lightly burned around the edges?" At the core of this book is a seeker, a person trying to make sense out of an unintelligible world, confronting the darkest dimensions of human nature, and writing a gorgeous, meta-physically charged poetry.

David Bottoms, the Poet Laureate of Georgia, teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He is the author of four books of poems and founding editor of Five Points magazine. His work has been featured on National Public Radio and on The Southern Voice, a television series profiling Southern writers.

Customer Reviews (2)

Will be Remembered as Some of His Best Work
First and foremost, these poems will certainly satisfy long-time readers of the author's work with its southern settings and atmosphere.Anyone wanting vintage Bottoms is going to like this book.However, in addition to harkening back to his prior work, the poet definitely breaks new ground with his longer poems.I found myself completely enthralled by the extended pieces - so much so that I didn't want them to end, and neither will any other reader of this wonderful collection. Read it and thoroughly enjoy it.

A Balm for the Spirit
Memory and music intertwine in Waltzing through the Endtime, a book destined to insure Bottoms' rank among the maverick poets of all time. Throughout the book, Bottoms achieves the swaying arc of the waltz, matching its sweeping rhythm with the mastery of his lines, lines as all-encompassing of the human spirit as Whitman's. Roethke said a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is, and with Waltzing through the Endtime, Bottoms offers immeasurable blessing for us all. Like no other poet writing today, he rages against the materialism of our time and delivers us once again restored and spiritualized.

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Book Description
from his 1979 Walt Whitman Award book to present ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Could you be moved?
David Bottoms' poetry sings to my armored heart as no other poet's has.At first glance, one may wonder how a poet who writes about male oriented topics like fishing, hunting, and stealing Camaros could affect a woman in such a profound way.Bottoms' topics are just gravy on the real meat of his poetry which is all about affirmation of spirit and one's connection to nature and others.I've never stood waist deep fishing in a river, but I've surely angled for something while wading through my own deep waters, and the revelations he has are the same I've come to.My personal favorite poem is "In a U-Haul North of Damascus," which makes me shudder in awe each time I read it.The surface of the poem is about a man who is in the process of moving as he separates from his wife after years of "the cruelty of silence."But it's not the literal that is important here, it is the meaning under the surface.The narrator ends with:

"Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded
before he can see?Lord, it it possible to fall
toward grace?Could I be moved
to believe in new beginnings?Could I be moved?"

Another poem that struck me to the core is "In a Pasture Under a Cradled Moon," which is about the aftermath of a woman's miscarriage. The poem is full of Bottoms' precise and moving observations about the natural world around the narrator, the mysterious and mythic, the ordinary and the transcendent, how all of this can teach him about love and loss.He says:

..."I will sit here
only a while longer
studying the way the light drops into the trees,
the way so much love can be learned
from loss."

The tour de force "Under the Boathouse" is tale of diving in deep waters off a dock (literally and figuratively) and getting lanced by a fishhook. Bottoms turns the story into one of revelation and spiritual awakening.He writes:

"in the loud pulsing of temples, what gave first
was something in my head, a burst
of colors like the blind see, and I saw
against the surface a shadow like an angel..."

So many more poems are like this, deep and still, like the waters he often fishes.Read his work if you want to be moved.Could you be moved?

Top 25
This books was recently chosen by Georgia Center for the Book as one of the top 25 books by Georgians.Indeed, it's a fine book of poems by one of the South's most powerful voices.Super poems from Bottoms' first four books.

Beautiful poetry
Armored Hearts is a selection of poems from David Bottoms' first three books, plus a new book-length addition.Bottoms came on the poetry scene in 1979 when his first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was selected by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.His early poems are strongly narrative and very accessible, but still work wonderfully on the figurative level.Very frequently they show us how myth touches us in our everyday lives.Two of my favorites are "Under the Boathouse" and "Under the Vulture-Tree."At their best, which is frequently, Bottoms poems are stunning.Some of the finest work to come out of the south in the last 20 years.

where's the music?
although i like the subject matter here, i've got to say i'm not sure why this writer chose to write poems, other than the fact that each piece is short.one could write these as prose poems and it wouldn't really change the reading of the pieces.and too many poems begin like this:'alone ona hill above the festival, I listen past field noise' . . . I listen, Ihear, I see.I.I. I.I.too much of the romantic bluster that I suppose issupposed to be a sort of Whitmanesque/ deep-image conflation but feelsself-conscious.I love some of the poems, don't get me wrong, somewonderful images swirl up as the imagination confronts nature in this book. But I wish the poet played with perspective more. and I wish I got more ofa feeling of music from the line breaks, which seem awfully arbitrary tome.

One of a handful of this country's most gifted writer's!
No writer I know of can leap so effortlessly from the literal to the figurative, from the narrative to the mythic. The book spans his work from Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump to his most recent work, which seemsto me a culmination of his accessible narrative style.The voice in thesepoems resonates with a kind of stoic intelligence that resolves inevitablyin tenderness.Poems like Alatoona Evening are typical of the poet'sstyle, where simply rendered images (e.g. "these three stars soakingup moonlight")have the effect of both centering the poem as a wholeand creating a kind of expansion, an axis mundi. The best narrative poetwriting, today. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from American Journal of Agricultural Economics, published by Thomson Gale on August 1, 2006. The length of the article is 1085 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Kirp, David I. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education.(Book review)
Author: Amitrajeet A. Batabyal
Publication: American Journal of Agricultural Economics (Magazine/Journal)
Date: August 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 88Issue: 3Page: 767(2)

Article Type: Book review

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Book Description
This digital document is an article from West Virginia University Philological Papers, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2004. The length of the article is 5894 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Fucked Ivanhoes in the deep obesssion of memory: Andrew Hudgins, David Bottoms, and the legacy of war in southern poetry.
Author: Jane Hill
Publication: West Virginia University Philological Papers (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2004
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 51Page: 130(10)

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Book Description
This digital document is an article from Poetry, published by Modern Poetry Association on July 1, 1998. The length of the article is 686 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: A Sunday dinner.(poem)
Author: David Bottoms
Publication: Poetry (Refereed)
Date: July 1, 1998
Publisher: Modern Poetry Association
Volume: v172Issue: n4Page: p199(3)

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Customer Reviews (3)

An enjoyable, beautiful yet somber novel
David Bottoms was a teacher (maybe he still is) at Georgia State where I graduated from. My first few years in school I wanted to be a novelist and became an English Major. Bottoms was the guy whose class EVERYBODY wanted to get into.I never did. I tried 3 straight semesters and got blocked all 3 times. Later I changed majors (twice). Anyway, I heard about this genius/poet/novelist and I HAD to read his book. I am glad that I did. It is a simple story about simple people but it's beautifully written and the characterization/description/plot and well, just about everything, work well in the story. i only gave it 4 stars because I felt it could have been a lot longer than it was. I do not like SHORT novels and it left me wanting more. I don't know if any of you have ever read any Pinckney Benedict or Flannery O'Connor but Bottoms writes very much like them. I wish he'd write more novels. The book is a definite good read and I highly reccomend it.

excellent!
It's an excellent book that has great words to describe the story. It's good for visualization. The book makes you want to read more and more. I read five cahpters in one hour because it was so interesting.

Huh?
This comments on the previous review.The title character whose name this reader has forgotten is unforgettable.Excuse me, did I miss something? ... Read more

Book Description
Georgia on my Mind celebrates the unique beauty and spirit ofGeorgia-its land, wildlife, cities, towns, and people-with outstandingcolor photography and memorable descriptions.Featured are the finestphotographers in Georgia and the nation-David Muench, Willard Clay,David Perdew, and many others-along with selected quotations fromnotable Georgians and others who love the state, including SidneyLanier, Margaret Mitchell, Carson McCullers, Jimmy Carter, and manymore. Georgia on my Mind also features an introduction writtenexclusively for the book by respected Georgia novelist and poet DavidBottoms. ... Read more

Book Description
David Bottoms has a breathtaking ability to capture human tenderness, vulnerability, and cruelty in the brief turn of a line. Grounded in the contemporary South, his poems often witness people in their moments of failure, as their fantasies and families collapse around them, as they weep at gravesides, as they recognize their own fading image in the bathroom mirror.

"One cannot read Bottoms without being nerve-touched by his sardonic yet compassionate country-man's voice, his hunter's irony."- James Dickey

David Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous anthologies. He is author of several books of poetry as well as two novels. Among his other awards are the Levinson Prize, an Ingram-Merrill Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. An avid guitarist and fisherman, he divides his time between Georgia and Montana. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Vagrant Grace shakes down life to the essentials
Poems are often NO TRESSPASSING signs in the minds of the uninitiated.They, not unlike their creators, ward off readers because of willfully obscure and hard to crack forms and images endemic to the poet's world.However, David Bottoms places poetry within the vernacular.He welcomes the reader, all readers, within his dialogue of contemporary poetry.

The Georgia-native is a celebrated author, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, among other laurels; he speaks with an earthy language that tugs at the heart, direct, strong, eye-opening.Among his many books that I have read, Vagrant Grave is his finest and most spiritually rawboned collection of poetry, the kind of writing that shakes down life to the essentials.

This slim volume of ninety pages is about the tension between faith and doubt, the interior world of rural and suburban living with all of its spiritual relevance.Vagrant Grace is not a poetry collection apt to find a home in either religious bookstores or the placating shelves of those wishing for easy answers.With this said, each poem seems to inhabit a hyperrealist vantage point, the spiritual necessity beneath a very harsh natural world.Perhaps these and other warring factions can coexist: innocence and experience, faith and skepticism, all in a state of vagrant grace.

Though "In a U-Haul North of Damascus," one of the author's best-known poems, would have been a fitting addition to the collection, he does include twenty-seven poems first published in leading literary magazines.One poem in particular grabs the attention, "My Uncle Sowing Beatitudes."It is a vivid narrative about a farmer accosted in the field by his drunken cousin who strikes him for little reason.The younger man's attempt to start a fight is avoided when the farmer simply turns the other cheek in Sermon on the Mount fashion.This poem, not unlike the others, exemplifies the concrete necessity of free grace, sometimes in the hardest of places.

Each poem carries with it a burden, and begs to be read, listened to, even watched carefully.Both poetry aficionados and those who disdain the craft should explicate this volume closely.This is real world writing from a person who seems to be struggling boldly at times with the uneasy aspects of life and death, Georgia and the South, the past and the present.Intermingled throughout is a message of unsolicited grace, the meaning beyond loneliness.Vagrant Grace is a powerful blend of poetry from one of America's original voices.And though it may never answer the questions, at least it engages the issues with abandon.What a fine and welcoming book!

-------------Reviewed by Dayne Sherman

Extraordinary poetry
One must wonder at the motives of the previous reviewer, who is himself a Southern poet, though certainly not in Bottoms' class.Vagrant Grace is an extraordinarily beautiful book, rich in image, narrative, and music.Over the past twenty years David Bottoms has become one of the South's finest writers and has won a number of awards and fellowships for his work.Vagrant Grace marks a real development in the evolution of Bottoms' poetry.From vivid short scenes, he has turned here to longer and more meditative poems, but without losing the narrative power for which he is well known.The result is a spiritual depth hitherto unmatched in his work.The long centerpiece of the book, "Country Store and Moment of Grace," which deals with the desegregation of his grandfather's country store, is certainly one of the finest long poems to come out of the American South.This is first-class poetry.

Content with Contents
I enjoy the subjects Mr. Bottoms writes about, including the social customs of the American south, the outdoors, family life, but most of the poems seem slack in their language.They don't have a real suggestive zingbeyond the literal story.The author doesn't seem to weave words so muchas to present a couple of strands together.I should mention that I thinkhe has some good stories to tell, but he doesn't make the language sing, soit just doesn't seem like poetry.

"This fractured afterlife of memory"
At a time when so much of the poetry being published seems more concerned with style (how it says the little it has to say) than content, a new book from David Bottoms is a welcome restorative. Vagrant Grace represents bothan extension and expansion of the poet's concerns. Yet, there is noreaching after grand conclusions; the speaker is frequently content to posequestions like "Where are the images that edified?" Moreover, these poemsdon't always slam shut; they sometimes open out, or, as in "A Canoe,"simply end still "drifting away...."

The whole book is haunted by thepast--both personal and collective--and shows us how the present is also a"fractured afterlife of memory." The supreme achievement of Vagrant Graceis to be found in the sequences, in particular "Bronchitis," "A FamilyParade," "Occurrence in the Big Sky," and especially the book's centerpiece"Country Store and Moment of Grace." In the latter, Bottoms exposes "thoselittle self-acquittals, needle jabs of regret" that linger on into middleage after growing up in the segregated (and racist) South.This poemseamlessly weaves the past and present in a wonderfully realized,disturbing and, finally, graceful vision.

In one poem the speaker says "Iknow you thought you knew me,/ and now to hear me talk this way...." If youdo know Bottoms' work, you'll be both fulfilled and surprised. If youdon't, read Vagrant Grace and then get Armored Hearts, his new and selectedpoems. Without flash and fanfare, with subtlety and clarity, Bottoms hasbeen steadily writing his way into a permanent place in American letters.

Poems celebrating human tenderness and cruelty.
David Bottoms has a remarkable ability to capture human tenderness with a phrase, human vulnerability with a line, human cruelty in the brevity of a few words. His poetry is founded in the contemporary south and blurs the division between easily identified good and readily discerned evil. Theseare poems of exquisitely and elegant humanity framed in a world that isneither. Our Presbyterian Christmas: Wings and halos,/all she'd talkedabout for weeks, and there they hung,/two racks sparkling like silverdust./A woman holding a clipboard licked/the tip of a pencil. What was mydaughter's name and age?/The fours would be shepherds, the fives/would beangels./We were late and huffing/and thought we'd misheard./Rachel lookedat me, eyes wrinkled,/and turned to the table/where a pile of rags lay likedead leaves,/then faced in tears that stony Presbyterian stare./She couldbe an angel next year,/the woman said, if they let the childrenchoose,/they'd all be angels./Glare of headlights and sooty streetlights,drizzle/and a sharp wind from the north./But we wanted to walk, so Ibuttoned her coat,/dabbed with a cuff at her eyes./A block up ChurchStreet/she stepped ahead -/the roofs along the square were struggling tocatch fire,/and the bandstand in the park, the magnolias budding/red andgold, their flickering ranches/sagging with stars. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Poetry, published by Modern Poetry Association on April 1, 2001. The length of the article is 828 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: EASTER SHOES EPISTLE.(Brief Article)(Poem)
Author: David Bottoms
Publication: Poetry (Refereed)
Date: April 1, 2001
Publisher: Modern Poetry Association
Volume: 178Issue: 1Page: 7

Article Type: Brief Article, Poem

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Product Description
Exiles London JOHN CLELLON HOLMESTwo Poems HAROLD WITTFlorida MARK HALPERINTwo Tanka Sequences SANFORD GOLDSTEINWalking Bear STEPHEN DUNNINGThe Summons LEONARD NATHANTwo Poems DARA WIERSmoking In An Open Grave DAVID BOTTOMSConnect, Connect WILLIAM JOYCEAnecdote Of Two Poets KARL PATTENLaughter HARRY ROSKOLENKOMarch Winds ALFRED STARR HAMILTONTexas Photographs JOHN BOWLESAll He Will Feel RALPH SALISBURYThree Poems PAUL J. J. PAYACKA Bowl Of Kale Soup ARTURO VIVANTETo A Victim of Radiation ARTURO VIVANTEMarty Prepares The Kidneys STEPHEN KENNEDYFive Poems SANDRA LYNNDebussy And Proust JOHN TAGLIABUELearning To Hate You FRANNIE LINDSAYTwo Poems JOSEPHINE CLAREThe Canary Song TED SCHAEFERThe Fat Girl JAMES B. HALLTwo Poems MARY McANALLY-KNIGHTCaptive Audience: On Teaching At The Womens Penitentiary Barbara F. Lefcowitz Five Years Later Bette Beller SwadosA Tree Without Roots Bernard AndersonReviews by: STEVEN BARZA, GARY GILDNER, ROBERT M. FARNSWORTH, DAVID HALL,W. CONGER BEASLEY, JR, R. D. TAYLOR, TOM PAGE, DAVID B. HAKAN,SYLVAN N. KARCHMER, DAVID RAY ... Read more