Davis McCombs

Davis McCombs is an American poet. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, the University of Virginia as a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lilly Poetry Foundation, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the Director of the Creative Writing Program, University of Arkansas.

McCombs’ work appeared in The Best American Poetry 1996, The Missouri Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and other magazines and journals.

McCombs grew up in Munfordville, Kentucky. From 1991-2001, he worked as a Park Ranger at Mammoth Cave National Park.

Awards

• 2005 Larry Levis Editor’s Prize by The Missouri Review for a sixteen-part sequence of poems called “Tobacco Mosaic”
• 2005 Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award from Willow Springs for his poem “Rossetti in 1869”
• 2005 Joy Bale Boone award from Wind magazine’s for a poem called “Noodling.”
• 2005 Dorset Prize, chosen by Linda Gregerson

Works

• EchoRiver, Poem Hunter
• Star Chamber, Poem Hunter
• Visitations, Poem Hunter
• Candlewriting; Star Chamber; Visitations, National Endowment for the Arts
• "The Elgin Marbles". Kenyon Review XXVIII (2). Spring 2006. http://www.cstone.net/~poems/elginmcc.htm. 
• Tobacco Mosaic, The Missouri Review, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2005^[1]
• "Thirty September". Virginia quarterly Review. Spring 2006. http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/spring/mccombs-thirty-september/. 
• "Nesta". Virginia Quarterly Review. Spring 2006. http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/spring/mccombs-nesta/. 

Books

• Ultima Thule. Yale University Press. 2000. ISBN 9780300083170. , Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
• Dismal Rock. Tupelo Press. 2007. ISBN 978-1-932195-65-1. 

Reviews

McCombs is an intelligent, focused poet who always aims to match a poem’s intellectualism with emotional depth, and Dismal Rock is a proud testament to his ability.^[2]

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.^[3]

References

1. ^ http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/missouri_review/v028/28.1mccombs01.html
2. ^ Kyle Churney (Summer 2008). "Dismal Rock". Raintaxi. http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2008summer/mccombs.shtml. 
3. ^ JEREMY HAWKINS. "Dismal Rock". Black Warrier Review. http://blackwarrior.webdelsol.com/reviews/mccombs.html. 

External references

• Interview Project #3: Davis McCombs , dislocate blog, November 22, 2006
• Melee Poetry Reading, Davis McCombs, Winter 2007 edition of Melee
• An Interview with Davis McCombs, Poem Of The Week
• Davis McCombs, Mixed Media, KET

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