We Almost Disappear

David Bottoms

Rooted in the ways of Southern families, David Bottoms turns his narrative skills to intimate and personal tales, documenting the failing health of elderly parents and the vibrancy of youth within a setting where “mostly there was silence, as though they’d all agreed / the world was beyond comment.” These poems blend history with the immediate present in a passionate and compassionate collection peopled with tobacco-spitting grandmothers, baseball coaches, undertakers, bluegrass musicians, and a growing daughter.

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ISBN: 9781556593314

Format: Paperback

We Take My Grandpa Fishing

Dusk already, and a few random croakers on the far bank.

My mother whips the flashlight around her feet—copperheads,
     moccasins,
who knows what else in these weeds.
But this is the time to fish, when dark blurs the woods,
and croakers tune up
along the smudged-out bank.

He scoots his lawn chair too close to the water and leans out
over the shallows. She’s set down the rules,
she shakes her finger.

Wind at our backs, and his left hand whips the cane pole.
The tall weeds hiss, the black trees
rattle their scales. Heavy belches circle the pond,
and he perks an ear.

This is the time to fish, the wind stirring, the water cooling,
the dark swallowing the pond. Sure, he hates
the pole, but he can’t manage a reel, not since the stroke,
not with his bum right hand.

He’s not complaining, though,
not about the hand. It flops now on his bony leg, warty,
spotted, puffed like a frog on root.

About the Author

David Bottoms (1949—2023) was the author of several books. His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of eight other books of poetry, two novels, and …

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Reviews

“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

“David Bottoms is one of our necessary poets… a storyteller, a seeker, a Southern writer rooted in place and coming to terms—or trying to—with ultimate things. We Almost Disappear rescues memories from oblivion and holds them up to the light—transformed, transfigured. It is a radiant book.” —Edward Hirsch