Ultima Thule

Davis McCombs received a B.A. in 1993 from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia in 1995. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 1996 to 1998. His poem “The River and Under the River” was featured in The Best American Poetry 1996; other work has appeared in the Missouri Review, no roses review, and the Columbia Poetry Review.

“[McCombs] lucidly mines Kentucky’s cave country. . . . Throughout, Mammoth’s fantastical underworld—a place of ‘eyeless fish,’ dripstone nodules that ‘live and grow, and when struck, produce/melodious tones, liquid and wavering,’ boat rides on subterranean rivers reminiscent of ‘Styx, Lethe’—is calmly revealed through McCombs’s translucent, musical language. . . . The rough geology of the landscape . . . and the discovery of its shape . . . become urgent images that strikingly illuminate darkened interior spaces.”—Megan Harlan, New York Times Book ReviewSelected as a finalist for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award in the Poetry category