By the time he'd hit eighty, he was something out of Ovid,
his long beak thin and hooked,
the fingers of one hand curled and stiff.
Still, he never flew. Only sat in his lawn chair by the highway,
waving a *** wing at passing cars.
I was a timid kid, easily spooked. And it seemed like touchy gods
were everywhere—in the horns
and roar of diesels, in thunder, wind, tree limbs thrashing
the windows at night.
I was ashamed to be afraid of my grandfather.
But the hair on his ears!
The cackle in his throat!
Then on his birthday, my mother coaxed me into the yard.
I carried the cake with the one tiny candle
and sat it on a towel in the shade.
I tried not to tremble,
but it felt like gods were everywhere—in the grimy clouds
smothering the pine tops, the chainsaw
in Cantrell's woods—everywhere, everywhere,
and from the look of the man
in the lawn chair, he'd ****** one off.
David Bottoms was born in Canton, Georgia in 1949. He earned an MA from the University of West Georgia and a PhD from Florida State University. In 1979, Bottoms won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his collection Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump.
The book—filled with bars, motels, pawnshops, truckers, waitresses, and vandals—was recognisably Southern in tenor and landscape.
Since Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, Bottoms has continued to write poems that “communicate the implications of experiences” through clear narratives, natural and animal imagery, and influences that range from church and blue-grass music to the work of James Dickey, who was a close friend.
Speaking to William Walsh, Bottoms commented on his affinity for church hymns and spirituals: “There's so much water imagery in those hymns. It's the whole beautiful notion of crossing over, of getting to the other side. This imagery, of course, is ancient, and not uniquely Christian, but I suppose Sunday school largely accounts for my love of it. Also, as you know, lakes and rivers make such wonderful metaphors for the psyche—the conscious mind and the unconscious, the surface and that hidden realm below the surface. I keep coming back to that, I guess.”
Concerned with apocalyptic “endtime” prophecies, and delving deeper into autobiography, his poems circle and fracture around central narratives,
always filled with Bottoms's very own voice, his gift for evocative images, searching irony, and meditative poise.
David Bottoms has won many awards and honours for his work.