Vagrant Grace

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. These are poems of exquisitely and elegant humanity framed in a world that is neither. Our Presbyterian Christmas: Wings and halos,/all she'd talked about for weeks, and there they hung,/two racks sparkling like silver dust./A woman holding a clipboard licked/the tip of a pencil. What was my daughter's name and age?/The fours would be shepherds, the fives/would be angels./We were late and huffing/and thought we'd misheard./Rachel looked at me, eyes wrinkled,/and turned to the table/where a pile of rags lay like dead leaves,/then faced in tears that stony Presbyterian stare./She could be an angel next year,/the woman said, if they let the children choose,/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 I buttoned her coat,/dabbed with a cuff at her eyes./A block up Church Street/she stepped ahead -/the roofs along the square were struggling to catch fire,/and the bandstand in the park, the magnolias budding/red and gold, their flickering ranches/sagging with stars.

These poems, often "vagrant" in their narrative longings, arrive more often than not at a real experience of praise and wonder, what is referred to in one poem as "the body leaping naked toward God." One encounters in this book moments where the infinite breaks into experience with "seemingly effortless beauty of movement and form"(grace), a humbling gift that comes unexpectedly into our botched and broken lives, our parade of clumsy parables. What these poems make increasingly apparent is that to be wholly alive to ourselves within the world, our simultaneous allegiance to the finite and the infinite, requires a "radical faith."

In our current cultural milieu can one say that one feels blessed by reading a collection of poetry? Well, I will venture to say that David Bottoms' extraordinary new book, Vagrant Grace, reads like a benediction for all of us slouching towards the end of this century--prison widows, prodigal cousins, and fastidious suburbanites alike. Bottoms is at the height of his powers here--the might of his language delivers a kind of poetic moral vision that pierces the heart and revives the spirit.

Two years ago, I read Bottoms's startling "Occurrence in the Big Sky" in POETRY magazine. Now that VAGRANT GRACE has been published, I see that poem is no fluke. I've happily watched Bottoms develop from SHOOTING RATS AT THE BIBB COUNTY DUMP through the bright lights of UNDER THE VULTURE-TREE to this, his most profoundly contemplative set of poems. He's way past the "pretty good Southern poet" tag now. He breaks your heart and stirs the soul.