Ultima Thule

Ultima Thule by Davis McCombs, 52 pages

In this slim volume, McCombs offers poems focusing on the cave country of Kentucky, where McCombs was, at the time these were written, a park ranger at Mammoth Cave National Park. The poems touch on the majesty, mystery, and history of this, the largest cave system in the world, offering up reflections and meditations on everything from the people who lived in and above the caves in the past to the forces of nature that created them and the creatures that live there today. I particularly enjoyed the first third of the book, which comprises poems told from the point of view of Stephen Bishop, a slave who discovered several of Mammoth Cave's passages and led tours through them in the 1800s. I'm not usually a fan of poetry, but I very much enjoyed this evocative collection.