It's difficult not to take cues from a title, such as that of Davis McCombs’ second book of poems, which suggests a certain lack of hope. I found the difficulty compounded as I plunged into the benighted landscape of the volume and its first section, the sequence “Tobacco Mosaic.” This sequence, named after “a disease affecting plants of the tobacco family,” settles itself in the environs of Edmonson County, Kentucky, where McCombs was raised. The sixteen poems that make up this sequence seem to want to exalt, however modestly, the tobacco farming industry native to that region of America. As McCombs opens the first poem, “Stripping Room,” with “They were working past dark at the waist-high bench / that night;” I couldn’t help but think of his teacher, Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Digging,” that gently salutes the cutting of peat by the men of his family. Both McCombs’ and Heaney’s poems make the implicit argument, “This belongs in poetry.” Yet the poets elegize their subjects; in Heaney’s poem the speaker admits he will not continue the tradition of his family, and as McCombs details the dark and foggy realms of tobacco farming, we sense that the poet’s work also records traditions that approach extinction. The poems act as a sort of amber to preserve Edmonson County after the stripping rooms are long collapsed. And a beautiful preserve it is:
A hard rain shreds the afternoon’s clumped heat; it drips
off the ribs of the drooping leaves; it pushes potsherds
through the sediment, mixing and sorting what the plow reveals,
dispersing flint chips and projectiles, disarticulating bone
from bone. Now comes the wind off the bottomland;
it enters in the wake of the storm; it sniffs at the dirt-
spattered stalks, and smudges the downpour’s tracks
while the man is sleeping. (“Transplants” p. 11)
What we see here is McCombs at his zenith, flexing his raw power to render this landscape and make it live. Again I think of Heaney and the texture of his language that seems to give real body to the descriptions. McCombs smothers the reader, though, with the sheer weight of his obsessions. Take the third poem, “Lexicon,” for example, where in eighteen lines McCombs uses eighteen gerunds, six of which are “talking,” and four of which are “saying.” While it does create an effect, the never-ending suspensions of the present participles leave the poem feeling flat; the deliberate program of preservation becomes enacted in the verbs themselves and suffocates the poetry. Similar burdens occur in the reading of “The Tobacco Economy,” a fourteen-line poem that uses the verb “is” seven times. McCombs’ obsessions go beyond conjugation, though, and fall squarely in the realm of image as well. Across the forty-two poems in the volume, ten mention the “moon” directly, twenty-six refer to “night,” and seven employ the phrase “that night,” by rough count. I was unable to count the number of things that “ripple,” the masses of “vines” that wrap around the poems, or the particular illuminations of flashlights. I won’t suggest that a statistical analysis can offer qualitative critique of a book of poems, but the numbers illustrate a reading experience that feels oppressive and overly staged. The few occasions where McCombs allows readers out of nighttime in Edmonson County come as great relief.
The second section, “The Mist Netters,” begins with the poem “Rosetti in 1869,” which reminds us that a world of art and madness existed outside of Kentucky. The shift casts the particular darkness of Dismal Rock in such sharp contrast that I cannot help but wish for more diversions. In the title poem of the second section, as well, the reader finds a rare moment of relief in the language. Even as the poem occurs at night, I reveled to read bits of contemporaneity:
They aren’t—am I alone in suspecting this?—
bats until we see them, nor afterwards,
when banded and released, they flop out
past the lantern’s scorch of light, past
our radio telemetry… (p. 28)
Never has the word “telemetry” sounded so sonorous as after two-dozen pages of rocks and vines in the moonlight. The bats, themselves, are welcome here, in a landscape that frequently has more agency and bearing than any human or creature in the work. Somehow, the plight of American bats, which are currently being decimated by an unknown syndrome, makes this poem seem more urgent than any memorials to tobacco country. Perhaps, in the gloom of his poems, McCombs has stumbled upon something more fitting to elegize.