A Scrap in the Blessings Jar - (Southern Messenger Poets) by David Bottoms

About the Book

"David Bottoms is among the generation of southern poets who followed Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey. Like them, he is a storyteller whose work often explores the tensions between the self, society, and nature. Unlike them, he embraces the possibility of religious belief. Poetry has served as Bottoms's vehicle to conduct spiritual travel between the worlds of everyday reality and the metaphysical, often in a manner noticeably akin to the traditional quest journey. Recent books, and the new poems in this volume, reveal that his subject matter--the woods, animals, family, fishing, sports, music--has remained consistent, but his techniques have shifted as his spiritual quest has evolved. A Scrap in the Blessings Jar presents a representative sampling of Bottoms's poetry, with over one hundred pieces drawn from across his four plus decades of work."--

Book Synopsis

A Scrap in the Blessings Jar, a volume of new and selected poems by David Bottoms, captures the evolution of the poet's spiritual quest over the past fifty years. A native and longtime resident of Georgia, Bottoms draws inspiration from the American South, and his work examines themes related to family dynamics, the woods, animals, fishing, and music in an effort to, as he once told an interviewer, "reveal something about the hidden things of the world, the vague or shadowy relationships and connections that exist just below the surface of our daily lives." This book charts his progression from tightly wrought naturalistic narratives to works that reflect his shifting conception of the interplay between memory, the present, and the metaphysical. At heart, Bottoms remains a storyteller who employs figurative language to discover the extraordinary in the seemingly mundane, and whose poetry explores the depths of our existential condition and common humanity.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR DAVID BOTTOMS

"David Bottoms is brilliant in the clarity and richness of his language, profoundly humane in the breadth and compassion of his vision. He is quite simply one of the best poets writing today."

--Jane Hirshfield

About the Author

David Bottoms's first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of nine other collections of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. His other honors include the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize, both from Poetry magazine, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Bottoms served for twelve years as poet laureate of Georgia.

Ernest Suarez is the David M. O'Connell Professor of English at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and executive director of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.