Davis McCombs, who writes verse about the Cave Country of south-central Kentucky, where he is a park ranger, has been selected as the new Yale Younger Poet.
McCombs was selected by W.S. Merwin, judge of the Yale Younger Poet competition, for his collection titled "Ultima Thule," which Merwin called "[one of] exploration, of searching regard ... a grave, attentive holding of a light."
McCombs' poems are set in an area of Kentucky that is home to thousands of caves. The title of his poetry volume, "Ultima Thule" is the name of the most inaccessible chamber in Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, and also refers to the mythical farthest point north, the coldest and most remote spot on earth.
The volume is framed by two sonnet sequences, the first about a slave guide and explorer at Mammoth Cave in the mid-1800s, and the second about McCombs' experiences as a guide and park ranger there in the 1990s. Other poems in "Ultima Thule" deal with such subjects as Mammoth Cave's 4,000-year human history and the thrill of crawling into tight, rarely visited passageways to see what lies beyond.
Educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia, McCombs was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 1996 to 1998. His poem "The River and Under the River" was featured in "The Best American Poetry 1996," and his other work has appeared in The Missouri Review, no roses review and the Columbia Poetry Review.
The Yale Series of Younger Poets is the longest-running poetry prize in America, and is widely considered as one of the most prestigious. The competition is open to any American under age 40 who has not yet published a book of poetry. Each year, more than 600 manuscripts from young poets are sent to the Yale University Press, which runs the competition and publishes the winning manuscript in the year following its selection. McCombs' "Ultima Thule" will be published in April.
Since its inception in 1919, the series has published first collections of works by such poets as Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass. Judges for the competition have included Archibald MacLeish, W.H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, James Merrill and James Dickey.
The following is a poem from McCombs' winning manuscript.
Childhood was a mapless country, a rough
terrain of sinks and outcrops. Not once
did I suspect the earth was hollow, lost
as I was among the fields and shanties.
I remember the wind and how the sounds
it carried were my name, meant me, Stephen ...
called out over the cornfield where I hid.
There was no sound when candlesmoke
met limestone--just this: seven characters
I learned to write with a taper on a stick.
What have they to do with that boy in the weeds?
Am I the letters or the hand that made them?
A word I answer to and turn from, or the flame
that holds the shadows, for a time at least, at bay?
© YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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