Waltzing through the Endtime

Rating:
Summary: Another fetching volume from noted poet
Review: David Bottoms' latest volume has 14 poems, some of them long. In selecting this poet's first book as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Robert Penn Warren remarked, "Underlying all [Bottoms'] work is the unusual conviction that the world we see is trying to tell us something." The poet has not changed this approach in his more recent poems. Not that he has figured out what this "something" is--"Every spring/the world is such a tricky magician, tugging whole maple trees/out of its black silk hat...Miracle or sleight of hand/is what I fret about..."; from "Easter Shoes Epistle." Bottoms unerringly senses the slight, but definite impact made by the complex world with its unexpected discoveries and juxtapositions, "the unpatrolled landscape/of the psyche unfurled..."; from his long poem "Homage to Buck Cline."


Rating:
Summary: Amazing Metaphysical Poetry
Review: David Bottoms has for years been one of the finest narrative poets in America. Here both his style and subject matter have evolved toward meditation. The poems are still highly narrative -- indeed, this poet tells marvelous stories -- but they take time to stop and think about the spiritual implications of their narratives. This book, relatively short, should be read from beginning to end. It is an astonishing spiritual journey, intent on examining the quirky nature of faith and revelation. Speaking of Ramona Barreras, a woman who found the image of Christ scorched into a tortilla, Bottoms writes, "What does it mean that God keeps stamping his image on Pastry/and French toast,/on biscuits lightly burned around the edges?" This is, in short, a "book of the mysteries" for the 21st century, much as Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares was for the 1970s. In fact, Waltzing through the Endtime is every bit as spiritually intense as Kinnell's famous book. This book examines unflinchingly the nature of faith, the origins of evil, and the functions of memory, and perhaps most importantly, the love that all of these difficulties inspires. A beautiful book of poetry.






Rating:
Summary: Will be Remembered as Some of His Best Work
Review: First and foremost, these poems will certainly satisfy long-time readers of the author's work with its southern settings and atmosphere. Anyone wanting vintage Bottoms is going to like this book. However, in addition to harkening back to his prior work, the poet definitely breaks new ground with his longer poems. I found myself completely enthralled by the extended pieces - so much so that I didn't want them to end, and neither will any other reader of this wonderful collection. Read it and thoroughly enjoy it.


Rating:
Summary: A Balm for the Spirit
Review: Memory and music intertwine in Waltzing through the Endtime, a book destined to insure Bottoms' rank among the maverick poets of all time. Throughout the book, Bottoms achieves the swaying arc of the waltz, matching its sweeping rhythm with the mastery of his lines, lines as all-encompassing of the human spirit as Whitman's. Roethke said a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is, and with Waltzing through the Endtime, Bottoms offers immeasurable blessing for us all. Like no other poet writing today, he rages against the materialism of our time and delivers us once again restored and spiritualized.