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David Bottoms
was born in Canton, Georgia, in 1949. His first book, Shooting Rats at
the Bibb County Dump, was selected 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, The Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in over four dozen
anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of six other books of
poetry, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, Under the Vulture-Tree, Armored
Hearts: Selected and New Poems, Vagrant Grace, Oglethorpe’s Dream, and
Waltzing through the Endtime, as well as two novels, Any Cold Jordan and
Easter Weekend. Among his many other awards are the Levinson and the
Frederick Bock prizes from Poetry magazine, the Boatwright Award from
Shenandoah, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from
the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation. |
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“David Bottoms is a strong poet and much of his strength emerges from
the fact that he is temperamentally a realist. In his vision the actual world
is not transformed but illuminated, and in his language the tang of actuality
whets his compelling rhythms. Of few this can be said.”
Robert Penn Warren
“David Bottoms has what only a few poets of any generation possess:
an individual tone, what musicians call ‘his own sound.’ One cannot read him
without being nerve-touched by his sardonic yet compassionate countryman’s
voice, his hunter’s irony. Bottoms has come into American poetry quickly; his
place is already high, and will be higher.”
James Dickey
“David Bottoms’ poems are exceptional for their vigorous
narrative, their realistic scenes, and their mythical
density. His work thrives in the ordinary moment
illuminated so well that the specific reveals the contour of
the general. I think one might even say the eternal. David
Bottoms is among the handful of the best poets of his
generation.”
Dave Smith
“His
scene is indeed Southern, but the drunken hunters, graveyard
vandals, scavengers, truckers, and blowsy women with beehive
hairdos are not presented merely for local color.
Throughout this memorial book Bottoms captures the graphic
details of life as it “moves routinely toward one fact”:
death. Brief but brilliantly realized scenes of violence,
cruelty, grotesque humor, and despondency shine with words
well chosen. The ring of hard truth resonates with deeper
significance, the common mortality shared by animals,
ancestors, the earth’s common inhabitants whatever their
station.
Joseph Parisi
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