Armored Hearts: Selected & New Poems

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?

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.

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.

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 seems to me a culmination of his accessible narrative style. The voice in these poems resonates with a kind of stoic intelligence that resolves inevitably in tenderness. Poems like Alatoona Evening are typical of the poet's style, where simply rendered images (e.g. "these three stars soaking up moonlight")have the effect of both centering the poem as a whole and creating a kind of expansion, an axis mundi. The best narrative poet writing, today.