lore [Paperback]

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize 

Drawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs’s third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, and nearly forgotten ways of being and talking and doing. Rendered in a language of great lexical juxtapositions, here are days of soil and labor, nights lit only by firelight, and the beings, possibly not of this world, lured like moths to its flames. McCombs, always a poet of place and of rootedness, writes poems teetering between two locales, one familiar but achingly distant, one bewildering but alluringly present. 

Winner of the 2015 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize

“In these poems we see that what transforms is also transformed; that such is the nature of the conversation between time, place, and story. If it this conversation that McCombs's work amplifies with beauty, grace, and expertise.”—Collagist

“Its setting is the Ozarks: scrub, fescue, gravel dust, dumpsters, no one’s ‘pastoral dream,’ especially in winter.  And yet, as Davis McCombs writes, ‘There’s/ something here, isn’t there?/ This slope, these old erosions — / something that isn’t a remnant/ of anything. . .’ In thirty-eight haunting poems, McCombs offers that something to us—a wholeness attained not only through the stories and traditions of a culture but through the fusion of poet and place, poet and past. Here are the caves and petroglyphs, the widows and children and workers, the animals of legend and the animals of the fields. UnwlãŒ