Waltzing Through the Endtime
Like his fellow southern poets and age-mates Mark Jarman and Andrew Hudgins, Bottoms has a sensibility both Christian and modern. At Easter, he thinks of faith and its promise but also sees faith rewarded in a poor little girl (his wife as a child), with one dress and one pair of shoes to last a school year, imagining the mall, "where every wall sparkles with shoes," as "a city of light"--paradise? Or, as an earlier line in "Easter Shoes Epistle" posits, "Miracle or sleight of hand"? Recalling when, 16 with a new driver's license, he was caught speeding, Bottoms reflects on the cop who knew every boy in town and put the poet-to-be in his place in no uncertain terms, without telling his father: "Buck Cline," he asks, "how many charming stars in your crown?" Bottoms unfurls that tale of grace, the longest poem here, and its 13 book mates in long, freely broken lines (like those of his acknowledged master, Robert Penn Warren) that lend permanent attraction to important matters.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved