Jane Hill
Department of English and Philosophy
State University of West Georgia
Carrollton, GA 30118

To Own My Father’s Name: Not Hiding the Masculine
in the Poems of David Bottoms

[Studies in the Literary Imagination 35.1 (Spring 2002): 25-59.]

Born in 1949, David Bottoms can be read as an archetypal baby-boomer poet, though to limit any writer’s career to the historical function of being a spokesperson for one’s generation is inherently unfair.¹ Yet as a male poet who came of age during the Vietnam era and the heyday of the contemporary women’s movement, Bottoms both records and critiques the ideologies or, we might say, the baggage that comes with that particular journey. As a southern poet whose coming-of-age also coincides with the modern civil rights era, Bottoms becomes a cultural "three-fer," a barometer by which we can assess who we are and how we have evolved during history’s most instantaneously recorded and analyzed era of change.

In reading Bottoms’s poetry, I assume that he has relied primarily upon a single poetic persona throughout his career and that we can trace the evolution of that persona, the first-person speaker of so many of his poems, from the early work of the 1970s up to the most recent poems. In watching the shifts in that character’s conception of his role as a man living within the specific current of history that delineates him from men of other times and places, we begin to see the poet’s gradual yet steady (re)alignment with the traditional image of southern maleness even as we also note how he modifies and expands that image. In analyzing Bottoms’s poetry, Ernest Suarez has cited Robert Penn Warren, who describes the poetic process as "a certain kind of freedom and lack of dogmatism under some notion of a shaping process" (73). Seeing Bottoms as firmly in this aesthetic tradition, Suarez argues that "Bottoms emphasizes the individual and universal instead of the social and topical" (74). But I want to depart slightly from this view of Bottoms’s work, believing that the shaping process that Warren articulates works throughout a poet’s career as well as in the genesis of individual works and that this process by which Bottoms’s career has been shaped, largely by coincidence of his birthdate, makes any clear-cut separation of the individual and universal from the social and topical nearly impossible. Even if such ahistorical attention to this work were possible, omitting the questions posed by the poet’s relationship to the social changes going on around him from one’s consideration undermines the richly complex interweaving of the individual and the social that is integral to Bottoms’s poetry and creates a somewhat misleading, even artificial dichotomy.²

The basic questions that I want to pose to Bottoms’s poetry are these: How and why does his poetic persona undergo this shift? And what are the particular gifts that the masculinity that ultimately presents itself within the context of his work offers its readers?³ In pursuing these questions, I have found it helpful to organize the poems into four stages of Bottoms’s experience as a baby-boomer male: 1) boyhood foundations; 2) adolescent rebellion; 3) adult reconciliation; and 4) fatherhood.

In 1979 Herb Goldberg articulated the dilemma of men living in an atmosphere of change regarding gender identity: "The masculine imperative, the pressure and compulsion to perform, to prove himself, to dominate, to live up to the ‘masculine ideal’—in short, to ‘be a man’—supersedes the instinct to survive" (1). Mark Gerzon, writing five years later, continues the same line of argument regarding masculine identity: "we want to be seen as real men, whatever that may mean to us. This need is so strong, so primitive, that some of us will risk anything to satisfy it" (2-3). Gerzon goes on to suggest that contemporary males struggling with their identity as males often find themselves misled by the models they adopt: "Thus men today consume certain images of manhood even though the world from which they are derived may have disappeared—if it ever existed" (5). In the turmoil of such social change and the ready availability of obsolete models, Gerzon argues that "true heroism" consists of "the courage to explore oneself deeply and to act with self-awareness" (6).

It is precisely such courage that I believe Bottoms displays in his poems. For Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (1995),⁴ Bottoms takes as one of his epigraphs a passage from Saint Augustine: "My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not hide." If we read Bottoms’s poetry as a reflection of his speaker’s soul, we receive in this epigraph fair warning that all we encounter here might not be to our liking. Considering that three-fourths of this volume’s contents come from earlier books, that the poems voiced by those "previous" selves will inevitably run afoul of latter-day notions about gender roles and other social expectations, we enter this poetic house armed with the poet’s own proclamation about our possible and possibly negative responses and with his public affirmation of a decision that could have remained private, or at least unnoted in the volume’s editorial apparatus: the poet has chosen not to hide. He will, rather, stand before us, warts of a political or sociological nature intact. He will even ask us to take note of the warts and, if our own abilities allow, to participate in the act of remaking them, of enlarging our sense of who and what a man such as this speaker was, and is, and is becoming.⁵

Boyhood Foundations

In "Last Nickel Ranch: Plains, Montana" (AH 124), Bottoms sets a scene involving the family "of the woman / I love [. . .]"; the patriarch, the woman’s father, has called for the family to join in a huddle for prayer. The speaker, still an outsider here, knows in this situation some of the tension created between males that Michael Kimmel identifies in Manhood in America: A Cultural History: "the evaluative eyes of other men are always upon us, watching, judging" (7). When he is summoned to join the family circled in a hug, he ponders " the humility necessary for prayer," in effect, acknowledging that he, too, is watching, judging this man, the other male figure in the life of the woman he loves. Though the poem does not reveal whether the speaker joins the group, he does assert a strong confidence in his own moral system: "I know what I’ve valued."

This assertion comes from an adult version of the Bottoms persona, one who has passed through almost all the evolutionary stages I want to consider (the speaker is not yet a father, however). But the knowledge that he here asserts originates in a place familiar to anyone who has read this poet’s work. What he has valued resides in the world of his boyhood, a space defined by the family, the churches, the life of Canton, Georgia, during the 1950s and ’60s.

If we grant that identity formation and values acquisition begin in the home, we can look to Bottoms’s representations of his parents and other members of his extended family to begin defining what he has valued. In "The Christmas Rifle" (AH 50), Bottoms describes what is, for rural boys, an almost formalized rite of passage. With his father, he takes his first gun into the woods to learn the ways of hunting. Their ostensible target a squirrel, Bottoms and his father are really seeking, through this male initiation ritual, a bond that will mark their relationship for life. Looking back on this experience from adulthood, the speaker recalls two particularly vivid images: one is the dead squirrel itself, remembered in precisely the sort of sensory detail that foreshadows a poet’s life, but the other and, I would argue, the far more significant image in terms of what this poet will grow up to value is the touch that signifies the father’s unspoken praise for the child’s success: "Just behind me, my father is walking on needles, / the weight of his hand comes down on my shoulder." Through the paradox of the fragility and tentativeness evoked by "walking on needles" and the sturdy, solid weight of the father’s hand on his shoulder, Bottoms evokes much about the mysteries of parenting in the world that he grew up in.

The parallel poem to establish the place of Bottoms’s mother during these formative years is "The Boy Shepherds’ Simile" (AH 40).⁶ Taught the Christ story as a child, Bottoms recounts how even from "an early age I understood the problems this story presented and wrestled with them in my own ways, which I touched on years later in [. . .] ‘The Boy Shepherds’ Simile’" ("Turn Your Radio On" 87). He goes on to provide background information on his mother’s role as superintendent of the Sunday school and as organizer of the annual nativity scene performed on the church lawn. Because of his mother’s role within the church (and hence the community), Bottoms found himself regularly installed in these productions ("Turn Your Radio On" 87). Thus, we can assume that it is, at least in part, for his mother and in recognition of the values that she represents that the young shepherd served and that the older man looking back at that service can endorse it:

This was not a child wrapped in the straw
and the ragged sheet, but since believing was an easy thing
we believed it was like a child,
a king who lived in the stories we were told.
For this we shivered in adoration. We bore the cold.

Here again the closing image is one of weight, of tangible physical presence. The child shepherds bear the cold, but in that bearing they experience acceptance from the parent figure who has placed them in this display. The fragility in this dynamic is more complicated in some ways than the fragility of walking on needles in "The Christmas Rifle," for here the point of delicacy is an issue of imaginative understanding, of the children’s (perhaps innate) ability to understand the figurative as a means of understanding something deeper, more mysterious, finally "unconfirmable" ("Turn Your Radio On" 86).

By setting each of these parent poems in the context of the Christmas season, Bottoms establishes links between the narrative of his life, its nativity, and the broader implications of the Christian narrative (especially as rendered by Southern Baptists: "the stories we were told"). In a poem about another of his family mentors, his grandfather, Bottoms solidifies our sense of how his life has been measured against that particular narrative. In "A Tent beside the River" (AH 97-98), the speaker and a group of children who are his cousins (because Bottoms is an only child and all the children represented have a grandfather in common, I am calling them cousins) spend the last hours of their grandfather’s life holding their own church service in a tent outside the house where their relative lies dying. By lantern light they congregate "to call into play [their] own miracle" (97), singing what they can remember of the church hymns they’ve grown up with, hoping "to be heard / only by the One we wanted to hear" (97). While the capitalization of One asks us to read the antecedent as God (or Christ)—the ultimate patriarch—the poem also invites us, through the naive perspective of the children, to read the antecedent as the grandfather, who would have taught them the context into which they are now trying to place the incomprehensible fact of his impending death. The speaker, the best reader among the children, reads from the Bible as they contemplate their grandfather’s contemplation of his passage across the River Jordan (again Bottoms references the stories any Southern Baptist would have grown up with).

When morning comes, the children’s parents find them "huddled / in a ball like a litter of strays" (97-98) and urge them back to the "real" world, in which children are incapable of comprehending, much less facilitating, the safe passage of a dying man. The speaker, however, makes clear that these parents are mistaken; these children have experienced a transcendent moment during their make-shift revival:

[. . .] each of us saw him in a special way.
Then the owl came down to find us, whistled
a note of departure, and we remembered,
real or not, a shadow drifting over the roof.

Even from the perspective of adult memory—the poem’s first word is "Remembering"—the speaker authenticates the child’s belief, an affirmation of the grandfather’s value system, whether the shadow seen was or was not "real."

In "Sermon of the Fallen" (AH 41) an unspecified patriarchal figure tells the alert young speaker a story about death as the older man works over a "walnut box." The story might be the teller’s version of William Cullen Bryant’s "Thanatopsis," an account somehow both scientific and romantic of what happens to matter, including human bodies, at death. Because the Bottoms persona is mentored by Baptists rather than American Romantics, however, the story somehow takes a Puritan twist at the end: "So, he said, you had come to fall." Again, in his adult memory of the child’s response, Bottoms provides a clue as to the value system that shaped him: "Even as a boy, I could feel the trembling in us all."

Although this moral system has as a foundational element a certain sternness, for the believer it also provides a longed-for comfort. In "Zion Hill" (AH 133) a self-ostracized speaker imagines "the elect of [his] family drench[ing] themselves to the soul" while he sits alone, refusing to seek the revival embraced by the others. But he shows no sense of rejecting their goal: "who could ever stop desiring / that serenity? Even if it’s less out of devotion / than despair [. . .] ." Nor does the speaker suggest that he is no longer a seeker or that he has found a surer path to such serenity:

it’s not because I’m someone
who wants to be unremembered in his troubles,
or considers himself a physician
equal to his own heart.

Unable to feel with conviction what those elect of his family feel, the speaker nonetheless endorses their value system. In "Free Grace at Rose Hill" (AH 132) the speaker remembers a Sunday walk undertaken

to hear the many tongues rendering into one
the promise of an old hymn
and [feel] yourself listening suddenly
with your heart,

but this still unevolved male figure can only recognize his limitations: "I listened / my whole boyhood / and my listening couldn’t save me." The poem’s closing lines link his status as unelect directly to the concept of grace: "If it touches us, / it touches us," a recognition that can—and in the subsequent stage of our male protagonist’s development does—create a period of rebellion, of rejection of the patriarchy from whence one springs.

In three early (and related) poems—"Jamming with the Band at the VFW" (AH 15), "Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Grill" (AH 16), and "In Jimmy’s Grill" (AH 17)—although the speaker is chronologically an adult, he still appears to be seeking to make his way in the secular world according to the standards and values of his father’s and grandfather’s generations. In "Jamming" the speaker chooses to identify with "all men turning gray who dream of having died / at Anzio, Midway, Guadalcanal" and wants to dance with one of "their" women. Because the text of "Writing on Napkins" specifies the time and place of its composition—"Macon, Georgia, 1970"—we can assume that the speaker is twenty, perhaps twenty-one, and a college student. He sees himself as a struggling young artist who feels usurped, made extraneous by the poets of a jukebox featuring "nothing recorded since 1950." These artistic forebears create within the speaker a classic case of the anxiety of influence; as "father" figures, they make him feel small. In "In Jimmy’s Grill" the speaker and a male companion consciously choose " the back of the room / where a beer gut rolls like a melon on the green pool table" over "The girl in blue jean shorts" because connecting with the female would necessitate "buying a few beers / or telling a lie about the money we made last year." Because this version of the Bottoms persona measures himself against the values of earlier generations and finds himself wanting, he retreats into something close to melancholy self-pity.

Adolescent Rebellion

Not all adolescent rebellions actually occur during adolescence, of course. Sometimes an adult, measured chronologically, reverts to adolescent behavior for any number of reasons. Sometimes a young adult who has grown up in a sheltered, relatively conservative environment finds himself or herself ready to rebel the moment that he or she leaves home.

Representing rebellion against authority is hardly territory Bottoms can claim as exclusive, but Joe L. Dubbert argues that men growing up in post-World War II America found themselves constrained in particular ways that often led to a kind of hyper-rebellion, an overcompensation for the standardization of middle-class American life in that era. Dubbert reports that Edward Strecker, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, blamed the "progressive" education movement of the post-war era as "[militating] against a basic masculine instinct of wanting to be aggressive and dominant." Strecker believed that men so schooled "were unprepared for the rigors of the real world. [. . .] The result was immaturity and, frequently, a behavior pattern of overcompensation for a felt lack of masculinity" (240-41).

Another factor in Dubbert’s analysis of the post-war male mentality is the company man of the 1950s, a figure captured by the image of the man in the gray-flannel suit, a victim of regimentation and rigid social norms that promised, in return, through corporate "pronouncements about togetherness," a new "security and contentment for all" (243). Quoting David Cohn, Dubbert describes the not unsurprising male reaction to this dynamic: "To feel manly, men had to go off to the club, drink, and tell off-color stories ‘on the theory [that] this is virile’" (252). Kimmel agrees that for men of this post-war generation "Becoming a ‘bad boy’ [became] a positive goal with important social consequences" (228).

Dubbert reads Norman Mailer’s representations of the male figure as indicative of this mindset. He says of Mailer’s males, "The real male is a truly virile male, the hunter of animal flesh and the pursuer of sex. To do both well is to achieve and fulfill the American success story, the success of grace and salvation in finding one’s manhood" (264). Dubbert goes on to list "the very attributes that [. . .] come to be associated with the most red-blooded masculine men"; these men are "individualistic, anti-authority, and cunning" (259).

When Alice Friman and Bruce Gentry ask Bottoms about the use of crime as a recurrent trope in his work, both fiction and poetry, Bottoms makes an immediate link to common "impulses in our lives, these notions that we as individuals are really more significant than any imposed authority" (102), an observation that both links Bottoms to the mindset described by these social scientists and separates him, at least temporarily, from the value system of his fathers (and his Father, if we accept his statement to Friman and Gentry that "In the poems religion is [. . .] personal and substantial, important in a [. . .] direct way. [. . .] It’s fundamental to the poems" [104]).

Although certainly not the most vivid example of the impulse to rebel in the Bottoms persona, "The Window" (AH 103) provides evidence of consciously risky behavior during the speaker's high-school years. He and his friends, "After school, newly licensed / by the state [. . .]" and, thus, authorized in one way, drive in "reckless" carloads to observe a mythic, perhaps ghostly female figure who is reputed to sit in a certain window in a certain house. In this teen boy’s fantasy of encountering the female, the speaker points out that element of the experience that is its rebellion: in their effort to validate their sighting, they swear "no matter what speed we tore from the wheels / of our fathers [. . .]" that they have seen. Eventually, a teen driver risks too much and dies at the curve where the house sits. The speaker confesses that this rebellion took place "half my life ago" and informs us that he hasn’t "swerved since / into the wrong lane of any curve."

But any number of other Bottoms poems tell us that the speaker’s rebellion against the authority of family and church did not stop with high-school reckless driving. Of those poems in Armored Hearts that Bottoms selected from Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, his first book, originally published in 1980, the first six—"Wrestling Angels" (3), "Smoking in an Open Grave" (4), "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump" (5), "The Drunk Hunter" (6), "Below Freezing on Pinelog Mountain" (7), and "Cockfight in a Loxahatchee Grove" (8)—deal with activities that are not only rebellious but also sometimes illegal. These poems feature cemetery vandals, dope smokers who profane graves, drunks shooting rats in a garbage dump, drunken hunters, and cockfighters. Surely, this is Bottoms’s southern version of Mailer males.

It is also these poems that have been most persistently claimed as the essence of David Bottoms’s work. When Georgia Governor Roy Barnes named Bottoms the state’s poet laureate in May 2000, he cited the way that "Shooting Rats" evoked the realities of his own boyhood as one of the reasons he connected with the poetry. Barnes, himself only a few years older than Bottoms, believes that he and the poet share a vision of what growing up male in the Deep South was forty or fifty years ago. Commenting as recently as 1997 about his response to the first review of Shooting Rats that he read, Bottoms recalls an illustration that accompanied the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s lead review: the drawing featured "a young man leaning against the fender of a ’57 Chevy. In the background," Bottoms reports, "a gigantic bottle of Jim Beam stood like a monument to male adolescence. [. . .] I was cast for all time into the pit of southern male chauvinism with the likes of Harry Crews and James Dickey" ("Turn Your Radio On" 85). Robert Hill has noted the same phenomenon in relation to response to Bottoms’s work. He says, "Early in David Bottoms’s career, it was easy but wrong to identify him as a shit-kicking would-be cowboy [. . .] a mimic of James Dickey [. . .] a picaroon" (80). Michael Skube, in profiling Bottoms upon the occasion of his laureateship, says, "You don't have to be around Bottoms long to know what revs his engine. A sweet-running pickup, bluegrass the way it's supposed to be played, old tapes of the late Duane Allman's guitar riffs, a cut of beef at Longhorn Steakhouse, poetry that hears the deep truths the world is trying to tell us" (F1). Skube also notes the irony of the country boy’s residing in fashionable East Cobb County, one of metropolitan Atlanta’s pricey suburbs, suggesting that the poet's "groundedness" comes more from his "simple upbringing in Canton than [from] his upscale neighborhood" (F2).⁷ In repeated ways, critics and others have cast Bottoms as a poet and a thinker defined primarily, if not exclusively, by a very small and generally quite early sampling of his increasingly deep and broad body of work.

Both Don Russ and Suarez have named part of what is happening in these poems as what Russ calls "directly, if somewhat meditatively, mocking the trappings of conventional religion" (66). Suarez says of the group vandalizing the cemetery in "Wrestling Angels" that "They ravage whatever reminds them of the metaphysical because they dread it and want to affirm their secular perspective" (77). While both critics are right to place the acts of rebellion in this and other similar poems from this period in the context of a rebellion against religion per se, I believe we can also read the aberrant behavior as part of the speaker’s rebellion against those father figures of previously cited poems, against whose experience the speaker has measured himself and come up short. The only advantage he has to wield against these perceived adversaries is his youth, so the vandals in "Wrestling Angels" transform the angels into "old men lamenting their age" (3). While in an earlier era such angels might have had the cultural strength to prevent "needless" vandalism, they "have grown / too weak to wrestle," and the vandals’ stated purpose is to use their "crowbars and drag chains," images which evoke the James Dean/Marlon Brando stereotype of the masculine, "to salvage from the dead." On a literal level the dead are those who lie in the graves being scavenged, but metaphorically (and ironically because this behavior is among other things an avoidance of direct confrontation with the antagonist) the dead become the strong (and obviously still living) images of the father that the speaker has internalized.⁸

The speaker in "Coasting toward Midnight at the Southeastern Fair" (AH 9) assumes that his resistance to authority, to boundaries is, if not universal, at least common to those of his generation:

We all want to break our orbits
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
run the risk of disintegration.
We all want to take our lives in our hands
and hurl them out among the stars.

While Hill has called it "ludicrous to think of Bottoms's even considering to write something as thunderously challenging to created heavens as Dickey’s The Zodiac" (81), his thinking applies primarily to the later poems of suburban life. In this image from a much earlier poem, while the speaker doesn’t, through the form of his voicing this desire, evoke a Dickey-esque challenge to the Creator, he does suggest that his rebellion includes something of a desire that Dickey would surely recognize.

In "In the Black Camaro" (AH 46-47) the speaker sets out to steal the car of Billy Parker, whose life, as the speaker perceives it, is the opposite of the orbit-breaking defiance desired in "Coasting toward Midnight." Instead of breaking free, Billy Parker finds himself digging deeper and deeper into the boundaries of middle-class domestic life:

and I could hear through the cricket chatter
the rockers on Billy Parker’s chair
grinding ridges into his living room floor,
worry working on him like hard time. (47)

By comparing the consequences of Parker’s choices to hard time, Bottoms’s speaker suggests that he’s running no greater risk in stealing a car than does the man who sits

[. . .] rocking in his chair,
studying his coverage, his bank account,
his layoff at Lockheed, his wife laboring
in the maternity ward. (47)

Crime exacts no higher penalty than does ordinary life; thus, a man might just as well enjoy the risk and excitement of life outside boundaries.⁹

Several poems from Bottoms’s second book, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, capture the male tendency to incorporate elements of resistance to the civilizing, or limiting, nature of middle-class life within that life itself. In both "Neighbors, Throwing Knives" (AH 33) and "Local Quarrels" (AH 35), men seek to recreate something of the male wilderness experience in their suburban environment. In "Neighbors" the speaker and his knife-throwing companions use the sport of throwing at "Magic Marker images" of various beasts to "gauge the fine balance / between what is real and what is imagined," to "whet [their] aim" in their world of "boxwoods manicured by wives." "Local Quarrels" describes a suburban cocktail party turned into a duel for a group of men who exit the gathering to observe their "principals" settle a quarrel "As though the nineteenth century hadn’t crumbled / and polite society still made pretensions / about honor [. . .]." Although neither of the principals falls as a result of the exchange of gunfire, their effort to dramatize their differences in this manner that harkens back to an earlier code of male behavior makes them typical of a tension in many of Bottoms’s rebellious males. They often seek to solve contemporary problems according to codes of male behavior from a less ambiguous time.

In another of the poems most often cited to establish Bottoms’s "bad boy" persona, "Crawling Out at Parties" (AH 22), the speaker takes the movement backward in time even further. He sees his "natural" self, what we might call his truly masculine self, as caged by modern social expectations and praises the Scotch that frees him from those inhibitions to allow this other self to (re)emerge. This "old reptile" self enjoys particularly encounters with "tight-skirted girls," further emphasizing the connections between the speaker’s conception of self and issues of gender identity and interaction. The irony, however, of the temporary freedom that the Scotch allows this aspect of the speaker’s self is that in the contemporary world in which he lives this self is "Out of date," "moves awkwardly." Apparently rebuffed by the women he approaches, he finds himself out of options, "so slides back always to his antique home, / the stagnant, sobering water."

As in "In Jimmy’s Grill," the speaker here chooses not to pursue interaction with the female because of limitations he sees within himself. Sometimes Bottoms names his speaker’s limitations as economic, as in "A Home Buyer Watches the Moon" (AH 34): "And I, / who can no longer afford to live / in my two-story, have come out into the street/ to stare past the mailboxes at an abrupt dead end." Here the conception of the masculine is clear: if one cannot be a provider of a certain sort, one is not a man and faces only a dead end. No other future is imaginable. Yet in a later poem such as "In Heritage Farms, Settled" (AH 82), as the speaker continues to live that life he cannot really afford, as he watches "the Volvos crawl through the streets [. . .] and neighbors / [. . .] water / the same pink rose for an hour," he laments the very condition that has defined successful masculinity in "A Home Buyer Watches the Moon":

What worries me most is this constant settling,
my dog refusing to bark at joggers, content to stalk
to the edge of the porch, whimper back
to his nap, his muscles breathing.

Torn between the fear of becoming Billy Parker, rocking himself into the deadly groove of middle-class responsibility in "In the Black Camaro," and the panic of not being able to pay for exactly those things Parker sits calculating his ability to pay, the speaker projects his fears onto his dog. Even a beast finds his natural impulses deadened, his will to assert his dog masculinity undercut, by the life being lived in Heritage Farms. The name of the subdivision, then, becomes ironic because the narrator has moved to the contemporary rendering of his rural past, only to find himself still not measuring up to the males of the preceding generation in terms of being a provider and in terms of maintaining his sense of himself as a man. In "The Catfish" (AH 23), the speaker stops on the bridge at St. Simons, Georgia, to "rescue" a catfish abandoned there by the fisherman who caught him and deemed him " too small to keep." The narrator identifies with the fish’s dilemma and tenderly picks him up with a towel and throws him high over the bridge’s rail so that the fish might reconnect with its natural habitat, a place where he is an acceptable creature of acceptable size. Metaphorically, the narrator sees himself sending the fish out of water "back to the current of our breathable past."

Just such a return to a "breathable past" is what the rebellious Bottoms comes to long for more than anything else. In the poem that suggests the speaker’s involvement in the most dramatic illegal activity rendered in Armored Hearts, the narrator in "Rendezvous: Belle Glade" (AH 42-43) finds himself participating in a Florida drug drop. As he waits for the plane bearing "wrapped bales" that will hit "between the strands of light," he thinks not so much of the present reality and what it says about him and his life but about a British soldier stationed in Burma in a much earlier era. That legitimate military man from the breathable past might have used the pawnshop gun that the speaker now holds. By connecting psychologically to the British soldier’s fears and jumpiness in the combat environment, the speaker seeks imaginatively to legitimize his illegitimate activity. He seeks to be a soldier like the soldier his father (literal or metaphoric) had been, but he knows that he pursues a course of action that will not lead to such a resolution.

In "Hiking toward Laughing Gull Point" (AH 32) an aging speaker, who wonders about "what’s left of [his] hair [. . .]," enacts an annual ritual walk, but realizes that he is reaching a point of no return, that the options open to him diminish year by year, just as his hairline recedes:

[. . .] I think how the point
keeps drifting farther away
like some water-mirage
or a piece of land in a speculator’s dream.
How each summer I search for my dream
vacation, only to find myself feeling more like some gull
climbing toward the edge of an island,
a hook, the end of the line.

Perhaps no poem from his early work captures the struggle within Bottoms’s speaker to reconcile his impulse to rebel with his desire to deserve his father’s name, to be a rightful inheritor of the mantle of the patriarch’s experience, than does "Light of the Sacred Harp" (AH 44-45). Beginning as a classic rebellion poem in the manner of "Wrestling Angels" or "Shooting Rats," in "Light" the speaker and a group of fellow drunks find their way to a rural church, where, for warmth, they proceed to set hymnals afire in a trash can. They see themselves as transforming "God’s old house" (44) through the "good new warmth" generated by their bottle (44); they, too, are transformed through "the plasma of visionaries and hunters" (44). Eventually their fire gets out of control—along with the hymnals, they toss in funeral-home fans that picture Jesus in various scenes from scripture and withered altar flowers, until utimately the pulpit itself catches fire.

This cleansing blaze causes them to "kneel / for drunkenness and joy" (45), to hear the

[. . .] pure spirit
of voices returning in the joyful noise
of the Sacred Harp, singing over and over
the good gospel news that men do rise from dust
and ashes. (45)

Here, the speaker takes a sudden, dramatic turn back to the boyhood values that are the essence of his identity, and he longs to believe that for him there is still time to rise from the ashes of the dead ends and the destructive desires that have dominated his experience during his period of rebellion. He longs to believe that still he might become a man.

By understanding that the poems in Armored Hearts are arranged in four sections, presented chronologically, readers can see that the phases of development in the Bottoms speaker that I am suggesting are not part of a clear-cut, linear progression, but that these aspects of the speaker’s psyche rise up and recede periodically throughout the development of this character. It is possible, however, to see in each of the book’s four sections an emphasis on a specific phase, and in that way there is something of a chronology to the progression of the narrative persona. "Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt" (AH 39) comes roughly one-third of the way through Part II of Armored Hearts, in the selections taken from the poet’s second book, In a U-Haul North of Damascus. This poem, which clearly harkens back to the speaker’s boyhood and which pairs nicely with "The Christmas Rifle" as an initiation poem of sorts, again suggests that the speaker’s childhood was one typical for male children of the post-war generation. The men of that generation, according to Gerzon, turned the baseball diamond into "a gymnasium of American virtues" (155). "Behind the Chrysler factory," he says, "were the baseball diamonds. Inside the factory, men shaped auto bodies. On the diamonds, men shaped [their sons]" (155).What was true in Detroit was also true in Canton, Georgia, where the speaker’s father hand-cuts a "rough diamond, / [. . .] below the dog lot and barn," where he rehearses his son in "the strict technique / of bunting." Although the father is an excellent bunter, with control and skill to envy, the son cannot keep his "eyes off the bank / that served as our center-field fence." The father is trying to teach a controlled, responsible, workable path to success; the son longs to let one fly over the center-field fence as a visible sign of his power, his sense of the masculine.

In this baseball metaphor Bottoms embodies perfectly the essential conflict between father and son, between the World War II generation and their baby-boomer offspring. Contrary to well-entrenched stereotypes of the war generation, "Individual accomplishment and being a hero were," according to Dubbert, "secondary to the vast majority of soldiers, who fought more for self-protection rather than for personal glory or adventure, the kind of quest for action that had characterized a Hemingway and Dos Passos in 1917" (234). Thus, the bunt is the perfect skill for such a father to pass on, but his child, consumed perhaps by images manufactured by Hollywood or other elements of the cultural myth-making machinery, seeks a more heroic model than that implied by the bunter. Even as the son passes through "three leagues of organized ball" and finds himself able to "homer / into the garden behind the bank, / into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors," still the father keeps stressing the bunt, "the same technique, / the crouch and spring, the arm absorbing / just enough impact [. . .]." And still the son resists: "That whole tiresome pitch / about basics never changing, / and I never learned what you were laying down."

The father wants to teach his son something far more important than the bunt, something of greater significance than baseball. Like those Chrysler fathers, he is trying to teach his son to be a man; the baseball diamond, the bunt are merely tools for the work of fathering. The adult son who looks back, through this poem, is a person just now beginning to absorb the metaphor that defines his relationship with his father. In adulthood he can say, through his own metaphor of the poem, that he is finally receiving the message: "Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap / let this be a sign / I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice."

If this poem about baseball can be seen as a defining statement about the links between the speaker’s childhood and the path that he will ultimately take to male adulthood, a poem from near the end of Part II of Armored Hearts, the title poem from Bottoms’s second book, "In a U-Haul North of Damascus" (AH 63-65), serves as an equally helpful marker by which to gauge the poetic persona’s recognition that rebellion in and of itself is truly the dead end of "A Home Buyer Watches the Moon," the hook that awaits the gull in "Hiking toward Laughing Gull Point." The poem which precedes "U-haul" in Armored Hearts, "In a Pasture under a Cradled Moon" (60-61), links the loss of a child to miscarriage to a hard-gained knowledge about adult love and loss. "U-haul" picks up the life-altering event of the miscarriage ("that morning long ago / just before I watched the future miscarried" [64]) and connects that loss to the impending loss of the marriage within which the lost child was conceived.

In leaving his marriage, the speaker seems to take with him only items that define his rebellious self, possessions that mark him as male:

So the jon boat muscled up the ramp,
the Johnson outboard, the bent frame of the wrecked Harley
chained for so long to the back fence,
the scarred desk, the bookcases and books,
the mattress and box springs,
a broken turntable, a Pioneer amp, a pair
of three-way speakers, everything mine
I intended to keep. Everything else abandon. (63-64)

Among the things abandoned are his failures within the environment of the marriage:

Lord, what are the sins
I have tried to leave behind me? The bad checks,
the workless days, the Scotch bottles thrown across the fence
and into the woods, the cruelty of silence,
the cruelty of lies, the jealousy,
the indifference? (63)

Thus, a "bad boy" seeks to drive away from his failure at adult male experience, packs emblems of what he has perceived his male identity to be shaped from, and rides away in a rented truck, thinking his sins can be abandoned along with his marriage, his failed self.

But awakening in the morning sun of an vacant field "on Georgia 54 / a few miles north of Damascus" (63), the speaker finds himself taking cues from nature that suggest that "the world really could be clean again" (64). From the biblical associations of the name of the town near which he finds himself, the speaker generates a series of questions to suggest that he will become someone who understands, at long last, the lessons of the fathers, literal and bibilical:

Could I be just another sinner who needs to be blinded
before he can see grace? Lord, is it possible to fall
toward grace? Could I be moved
to believe in new beginnings? Could I be moved? (64-65)

The poems that comprise the third and fourth phases in the evolution of Bottoms’s poetic persona suggest that the answer to all four of these questions is yes: he will be moved toward embracing the very values he rebelled against. His new beginning will, in fact, be a return to his original identity: he will finally come to own his father’s name, which is his own as well.

Adult Reconciliation

Despite the emphasis in discussions of Bottoms's work on poems pertinent to the first two phases of development (as I have outlined them), more poems focus on issues of adult reconciliation, including the culminating stage of the speaker's own fatherhood, than on these earlier developmental stages. Thus, mine is, in part, a task of redirecting attention to this work somewhat different in tone and emphasis, toward the end of establishing a more balanced and complete vision of Bottoms's speaker and, thus, his overriding vision as a poet.

In "Sounding Harvey Creek" (AH 57-58), the speaker acknowledges that, for him, the point of fishing is not fishing itself in any traditionally masculine sense, but water, the basic element in which fishing takes place. That element, often associated with the feminine rather than the masculine, is to the speaker "mystery, / the something unknowable" (57) that he pursues despite an "ignorance of fishing" (57) and instruments that he characterizes as "dull / and virginal Eagle Claws" and an "impotent wealth of jitterbugs" (57). By casting this imagery in sexual terms and by imagining the fishing apparatus as "glow[ing] like jewelry" in his tackle box (57), the speaker begins to complicate the reader's sense of who he is and how he sees himself in relation to traditional conceptions of gender.

Although "In the Ice Pasture" (AH 71-72) figures the speaker in traditional heroic terms--he runs from his safe suburban home onto the icy but cracking surface of a pond to save a trapped horse--and suggests a mythic solution to the transformation the speaker prays for in "In a U-Haul North of Damascus," ultimately the heroic self-conception is undercut by the horse's having to save the speaker, who becomes, finally, only a passenger in the transforming experience. This poem, the first from Under the Vulture- Tree in Armored Hearts, is followed by "White Shrouds" (AH 73-74), a poem that recounts a much subtler, but ultimately much more significant, transformation within the speaker. In this poem, also set in an uncharacteristically cold southern winter, the speaker displays a protective impulse toward his wife that is similar to that directed toward the horse in the previous poem. But here the heroics spring from his willingness to accept the mundane responsibility of turning a single night's worth of wood, burned in a shallow fireplace meant mostly for decoration, into the warmth necessary to sustain the couple during a power outage caused by the freakish ice storm. A sense of responsibility to others, raised to the level of heroism, emerges here and will become central to the character of the "adult" Bottoms. He phrases this new version of heroism in language specifically linked to gender and, more specifically, to the male's role within marriage when he says that the husband stays awake all night, his beard freezing in the den's frigid air, in order "to husband the small logs, two at a time, onto the fire" (74).

Even as the speaker comes to redefine the heroic in this context--he must remain awake enough to husband, essentially--he also recognizes the limitations of male agency within the domestic world of the suburbs. In "The Voice of Wives Dreaming" (AH 79-80) the speaker imagines a gendered response to the drowning of a neighborhood child. In his scenario the men are, like the husband in "White Shrouds," wakeful, but they also "[know] / in this we account for nothing" (80). The dreaming wives have a visionary power that takes them beyond what the men can know or do: they "[float] face down / dreaming the voice of a different child" (80). Two other poems suggest a similar male response to the complexities of negotiating a gendered world. In "The Resurrection" (AH 83-84) the speaker returns to Rose Hill Cemetery (an early Bottoms locale) as a setting, but this time his companion is a woman with whom he debates the question of the after-life and whom he dares to enter an open grave as a means of settling their differences. He knows that this strategy is flawed, but he also believes in the possibility of renewal if he can make some kind of connection with this "other" who is so clearly different from his earlier cemetery companions.

"Home Maintenance" (AH 120) is even more direct in its assessment of the gulf that separates male and female in the contemporary domestic space. Portraying a scene of domestic violence, including male denial as part of that landscape, the speaker here abandons first-person narration for a generic second-person pronoun, casting the male figure as "you." Through this narrative strategy, Bottoms signals his readers that certain elements of his portrait of the male are perhaps separate from his own lived experience (or are lived experiences that he is less than willing to claim directly), but more significant perhaps is the suggestion that the limited male ability to "read" female actions is a generic attribute of the gender. He conveys this assessment through standard poetic imagery made ironic by the poem's dramatic situation: "Even now her meaning slips through your fingers / as she raises a glove full of roses."

When this inability to read the signs a woman sends is contrasted with an entirely successful though silent communication between male and female, such as that represented in "Shingling the New Roof" (AH 99), we return to the speaker's need to reconcile himself with the image of his father. In "Shingling" the speaker looks back at another childhood experience: he helps his father and grandfather put on a new roof, an activity that his mother is convinced he is too small to participate in. When the speaker falls, only to be caught by his father, whose face is "whiter than caulk," he remembers vividly "the expression / that passed from [his mother's] face to his [father's]," a look so clear in what it communicates that the speaker spends the rest of the day on the porch with his mother, contemplating the deep bruise created by his father's desperate grip as it emerges on his wrist. Here, not only can he see his mother's message sent and successfully received by his father, but he can also read, in the bruise that now marks him, the power of the commitment that his parents have to each other and to him.

According to Kimmel, after World War II, "It was often as fathers that men sought to anchor their identities as successes as men," and, he goes on to say, "In the increasingly suburban postwar world, fathers embodied masculinity" (226-27). I would suggest that the young speaker in "Shingling the New Roof" reads precisely this message in the brief moment of silent communication between his parents, and I would further argue that the chief goal of the speaker in terms of reconciling himself to his adult role is to come to terms with the concept of masculinity embodied in this particular image of his father.

Because it is often easier to deal with surrogates than with the real thing, Bottoms offers a series of poems that represent specific male artists as such surrogates. As the speaker comes to terms with each of these "historical" father-figures, he prepares himself for the eventual task of coming to terms with his actual father. "Homage to Lester Flatt" (AH 88) takes as its epigraph the telling line, "Troublesome waters I'm fearing no more," and ends by addressing the musician directly: "Lester, singing whatever we want to about the dead / is the easiest thing in the world. / Believing it the hardest." "Face Jugs: Homage to Lanier Meadows" (AH 89) makes even more explicit the speaker's willingness to explore links between himself and his fathers, both literal and metaphoric, in order to find the belief that will carry him past his adolescent doubts. Looking at the shelves holding the sculptor's jugs with faces, the speaker suddenly finds himself among the ceramic faces staring back at him, and "happy as a man who's found his puzzle's missing piece, / it frightens you to think you might have left him." The gospel banjo of Little Roy Lewis serves as the vehicle of the speaker's return from a three-day fever in "Gospel Banjo: Homage to Little Roy Lewis" (AH 87), a return to reality for which he is grateful, despite the beauty of the music-inspired dream of his fever. In all three of these "homage" poems, we see the speaker honoring a father figure and choosing to deepen his understanding of self and father through the act of voicing his homage.

In "Fiddle Time" (AH 96) the musician father figure has no name, but it is from this unnamed figure from the speaker's past that he takes his first memory of music itself. This mentor instills in the speaker the true artist's desire, the level of caring necessary to art, and in memory these gifts of process are even more significant that those of product, the actual music the fiddler was able to produce:

The truth is
he wasn't that smooth a fiddler. But he cared
for the fiddle, and in memory's raw first music
I still catch a measure of that care.

This level of care is, in essence, an aural rendering of the bruise that is the visual sign of caring in "Shingling the New Roof." As the speaker begins to connect the concerns of such artists with the concerns of living and, more specifically, with the concerns of domestic life, he moves ever closer to adult manhood, as Bottoms will come to define it, and toward fatherhood itself.

While each of these artist figures is a musician or a visual artist, in "A Canoe" (VG 61-62), which carries the inscription "remembering James Dickey," Bottoms comes to terms with the figure who has been most often cited as his poetic "father." Written after Dickey's death, this poem finds the speaker contemplating an empty red canoe making its way down a river. He notes its effect--or lack thereof--on three fishermen it passes; they continue to lounge in lawn chairs, waiting for carp to bite. Unlike the speaker, they feel no need to make a metaphor of the empty canoe. But to him--the Bottoms persona--the canoe represents the deepest possible stirring humans could ask for; to him it is "A metaphor untethered, loose / and retrievable, / but drifting away [. . .]" (62). This crucial acknowledgment that our best efforts to make meaning, achieve knowledge, come to understanding are ultimately never enough, can never be adequate to the reality we seek to know and understand, does not mean that we should cease our ultimately doomed efforts to grasp the essence of the father, to shape what we can come to know through metaphor into meaning. But the speaker's reverent representation of the poetic father as a metaphor finally free of our efforts to make him mean is possible, I believe, largely because, between the earlier homage poems and this one, that speaker has come to terms with the literal father and with his own limited abilities to render the father his due, both through art and through the living of the poet's own "real" life.

Just as the understanding evidenced in "A Canoe" springs from the speaker's being positioned on the river bank in a way that allows him to see canoe, fishermen, and the relationship between them, most similar recognitions depend upon the perceiver's positioning himself (or herself) appropriately. While every narrative poem develops (to some extent) a setting within which recognition occurs, the tradition of poetry itself has developed certain standard metaphors for the optimal conditions for poetic perception. In American literature, one of the most famous of those metaphors is wakefulness.¹⁰ Bottoms uses his poem "Awake" (AH 90) to link his poetic persona's character to that tradition. In addition to serving as a call to a general poetic alertness to the world around us, this poem also solidifies Bottoms's connections to another set of images central to American poetry, those of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

Beginning in a winter that lingers too long and thereby creates doubts about spring and its promised renewal, "Awake" cautiously embraces "a green tentative feeler" that appears in the yard as evidence that "Underground / something is stirring, climbing through the veins." Like the protagonist of Eliot's epic, Bottoms's protagonist, here again rendered with the generic second-person pronoun, faces the situation before him by engaging in a cautiously optimistic fishing expedition:

so you take your rod and tackle box,
you walk the quarter mile of thickening woods,
stand in the weedy mire bordering the shallows,
ease your fly onto the surface.

Reading backward from this place in Bottoms's career can place a poem such as "Shooting Rats" in a context somewhat richer than reading it as an adolescent rebellion poem suggests.¹¹ But I want to read forward from this poem instead, using this image of the patient fisherman, who seems at peace in this place despite its irregularities and inherent insecurities, to serve as a figurative guide in the search for the father and his essence and in the subsequent effort to use that newfound knowledge to construct a genuine adult male identity for the speaker. This is a fisherman awake enough to see as the tradition of the poetic perceiver demands we see.

Another fishing poem, "In Louisiana" (AH 104), sends the speaker stumbling under the burden of his equipment into an early autumn evening in hopes of fishing. He falls and dreams of his father, making of him a mythic savior who reaches into the murk of the swamp and pulls up "the chest and head of a boy, / his fingers still tangled in a knot of roots." This Everyboy, we might call him, is a "gaped mouth drooling sludge [. . .]" with "dull fish eyes / wide in the new light / like the stunned eyes of the dying." For the speaker, this boy, obviously characterized as unawake and unfit for the tasks of the real world, becomes all boys, wrested into an awareness of their adult responsibilities by their strong, perhaps even overpowering dreamed fathers, yet unprepared for the tasks they face, "their dumb, stunned eyes already clouding, / looking for one root, / the corner of a bed sheet, anything in the world to clutch."

The specific biography of Bottoms's father becomes clear in "Naval Photograph: 25 October 1942: What the Hand May Be Saying" (AH 105). In this poem, the speaker's father inhabits the all-male world of the cruiser Atlanta in the Pacific. The overwhelming maleness of this environment is underscored in the photograph from which the poem departs by "a sailor / clowning on a gun turret, barrel straight up between his legs." But the hyper-masculine assertion of this comic image is juxtaposed to a different representation of masculinity when the speaker observes "[his] father [. . .] standing with the gunners / [. . .] a shadow / in a wide cluster of shadows [. . .]." Because the infallible hindsight of history allows the speaker to know the men's futures, he seeks meaning in the sign of his father's wave (just as he would later and belatedly see the sign of his father's message to him in the bunting lessons of "Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt"), but this more mature speaker is also acutely conscious that the men who wave, including his father, do not know the future, but wave only "for all the reasons anyone waves." They are, he understands, both ordinary and extraordinary, and it is the job of his adult life to learn how to relate to both those identities that are his father.

"The Anniversary" (AH 106-07) continues the story of the speaker's father's experience in the Pacific. As an annual ritual, the adult son performs a commemoration of his father's being wounded in the Japanese attack on the Atlanta. He drinks alone in a room without lights so that he might understand the darkness faced by his father a generation earlier. He also denies himself the music that might accompany his drinking on any other night of the year. In other words, he seeks to live, as closely as he can through his imagination, his father's experience.¹² But he also seeks to partake of his father's lived experience as a means to his own resurrection or renewal, a desire made clear by the speaker's appropriation of the language of the sacrament of holy communion: "This is your blood in remembrance of you, / who died one night at sea and lived" (107). The explicit linking of the father figure with Christ and the speaker's ritual of imbibing the father via the metaphor of communion create the possibility of the speaker's rebirth as an adult male.

Yet this post-war baby-boom child is unable to escape the irony of his imaginative engagement with a terrifying reality that his father was forced, by history, to encounter literally. His father, fished from the Pacific and taken for dead by the sailors who rescue him, was, according to the speaker,

dead as any drunk in any armchair
who trembles at the horror of his thoughts
and learns, as he learns every year
that the power in the blood to terrify
is sometimes the power of love [. . .]. (106)

The struggle to identify with the father leads the speaker to his desk, from which he takes, not the poet's pen to record his experience, but a small knife with which to touch an old scar. He wants to encounter his father's truth in a physical way, but the ultimate act of the poem itself suggests that he moves beyond the knife to the pen eventually, an acceptance of the essential irony of his position vis-à-vis the father.

Several poems in Vagrant Grace reiterate the adult speaker's realignment with his father, suggesting that the paternal relationship remains a theme central to the evolution of this speaker. The best example is "A Family Parade" (11-14), in which the speaker recreates his father's participation in a small-town parade by clowning and doing tricks on a bicycle for the kids, including his own daughter, in his suburban subdivision. Through this recreation he comes to understand his place within the family constellation and the adult male's place within the social order: "Finally, yes, I know this is about eternity, / this circling, this following / [ . . .] / the way my father leads" (13). Then he solidifies his newfound understanding through evocation of his father's superior performance in this clown's role as well: "Yes, here he comes again, noble // And father, clutching /And revving, making his circle" (13).¹³

"The Desk" (108-09), which follows "The Anniversary" in Armored Hearts, is the poem in which the speaker most directly names the dilemma that faces him in regard to his father. In an action that he identifies as "my first crime" (109), the speaker with a kind of desperate frenzy enters the school in Canton where his father, as a student, had carved his name into a desk. The entry into forbidden territory, belonging to patriarchal figures that we might label the enemy here ("the city, the county, / the state, whatever government claimed dominion" [109]), becomes an approximation for the speaker of the dangers of battle that he knows his father to have endured. Yet, as in other poems on this theme, there is an acute consciousness of the irony involved in such an imaginative association. The speaker has first encountered this marked desk in his own years as student, when he must literally follow in his father's footsteps; finding it again, years later on his illicit mission, he uses the carved name, the wooden desk, to trigger a genuine adult effort to know and understand his father:

and [I] wondered at the dreams he must have lived
as his eyes ran back and forth
from the cinder yard below the window
to the empty practice field
to the blade of his pocket knife etching carefully
the long, angular lines of his name,
the dreams he must have laid out one behind another
like yard lines, in the dull, pre-practice afternoons
of geography and civics, before he ever dreamed
of Savo Sound and Gaudalcanal. (108-09)

Because he grasps the concept that his father might have dreamed a life different than the life he has led and because he, in this late transition into adult maleness, in fact, bears his father's name, the speaker steals the desk. Having been given the name at birth, he now feels compelled to take it, by his own choice, and to rest easy in his possession, despite the irregularities inherent in the process he uses to accomplish his goal: "And rarely do I fret when I see that oak scar leaning / against my basement wall, though I wonder what it means / to own my father's name" (109).

The conclusion here is, I would argue, another prime example of Bottoms's particular brand of irony. The continued posture of not quite grasping the import of his relationship with his father is in part homage to the man he clearly perceives to be the better man, a diminishing of his own growing understanding and his clearly superior abilities to express himself (and, by extension, the father, as he perceives him). For through that expression the speaker makes abundantly clear that he does know what it means to own that name--in both this poem and many of the others I've discussed. Another element of this irony, however, emerges in the gap between where the speaker is at this stage in his development and the even greater understanding of what it means to own his father's name that emerges in those poems devoted to the speaker's own experience as a father. In one sense, until he becomes a father, he cannot know fully what his name means.

Coming to terms with the father and accepting one's adult male role, of course, affect aspects of one's experience and identity not directly related to the paternal relationship. Whether the change is as simple as the substitution of bird watching for movie watching (and other typical drive-in activities) in "Warbler at Howell's Drive-In" (AH 121), in which the speaker acknowledges that "That was you then. / [. . .] // And this is you now, middle-aged and beyond," or as profound as the transformed conception of male-female bonds revealed in "Chinese Dragons" (AH 122), in which the speaker and the woman he loves get tattoos to make their connection both tangible and permanent ("our desire for permanence and the permanence / of our desire"), becoming an adult creates a different way of perceiving and of living for this character.

Perhaps the distance that Bottoms's speaker has traveled can best be measured by examining how the way of perceiving and acting that he endorses in "Armored Hearts" (AH 113) differs from the perceptions and actions of the speaker in "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump" (AH 3). In the earlier poem the speaker, inextricable from his companions, seeks out the experience of killing rats at the dump. Even if the rats become spiritual cousins of humans, all of us heading toward an eventual darkness, the primary impulse at the time of the shooting grows out of a perception of the rats as fair game in the quest to release male energies and to prove masculine prowess. In "Armored Hearts" the speaker consciously and conscientiously separates himself from his neighbor, his ostensible male peer in this scenario, and chooses to assist the turtles that the neighbor sees as fair game in the same way that the younger speaker perceived the rats. In fact, because the turtles are guilty of killing the neighbor's ducks, they are perhaps fairer game than were the rats, in broad ethical terms. The speaker here also needs only to enact his particular brand of protection, even nurturing, not to claim public credit for his heroics or to create a direct and public confrontation with the neighbor.¹⁴

"Allatoona Evening" (AH 140) summarizes nicely the path the speaker has taken to attain his hard-won maturity. He tells the reader about a burden he has carried, an "it," that he intends to discard in the lake's waters. Nature, the master he perceives himself to serve in "Armored Hearts," here again takes his side, encourages him to pursue the path he has come to see as his. A choir of crickets calls him "to lay down / [his] anger / [. . .] / lay it down, they say, on the green stones / beside this water." And, in following their advice and laying down that anger that has driven him for years in what has finally proven to be a false direction, he will lose nothing, for that anger sated "could bring you to no better place. / Nothing is more beautiful than your emptiness." That emptiness is, of course, another irony, for it is only of anger that the speaker is empty. Its absence is the thing that has allowed him to acknowledge the presence of so much more--the values that are his values, the identity that is essential to the man he wants to be, has chosen to become.

That man is not, Bottoms makes clear in "A Morning from the Gospel of St. John" (VG 75), the traditional heroic male figure. Pondering himself in the bathroom mirror, the speaker perceives the gap between his body and the conventions of the ideal male:

and pondering myself limp and priestly,
laced with blue veins, I judged nothing threatening.
Sometimes, I admit, I even look at this unremarkable body
which is beautiful only
in design, and feel a laughable joy.

Imagining where one might go from this point, the speaker says, "I love to imagine being startled / into innocence, heedless / of the body leaping naked toward God." No longer bound by the constraints of his body, no longer defined by the expectations of the male form and the actions and beliefs attached to that form by personal and cultural assumptions, the speaker positions himself for possible transformation, despite the difficulty inherent in that process: "in middle age rebirth isn't such easy work" ("At the Grave of Martha Ellis," [VG 73]).

Fatherhood

Perhaps the central element for Bottoms's speaker in this rebirth is fatherhood. In "Barriers" (AH 123), alone and lonely during a thunderstorm, he takes comfort in a remembered story of a young girl, frightened during the night, slipping into bed with her parents for a sense of safety and comfort. He imagines her parents' welcoming her as a tangible, even ultimate declaration of their love for her, "though they never let her sleep between them" and undercut the supremacy of the marital bond.¹⁵ From this remembered story, the speaker turns to an examination of his own current status:

I am not a father, but I think about the love of fathers,
the sheet thrown back for the daughter, the rough hand
rejoining the hand of the mother.
And because of her story
I know more about the love a man can feel for a woman,

love not born of the self
or what the self gives the world.

Near the end of Armored Hearts and throughout Vagrant Grace, Bottoms at last speaks as a father and completes the circle of his relationship with his own father and the values regarding family and the masculine role that his father represents. "Sleepless Nights" (AH 136) contrasts the middle-aged shame of drunkenly lurking outside his ex-wife's home (and his former home, of course) without any effective sense of place or identity with the mature hindsight that allows him to understand that earlier self because of

[. . .] another night, pacing another darkness
ringed with geese and black sheep
and swans, singing again,
laughing, shouldering the complaints
of a newborn daughter.

In "A Daughter's Fever" (AH 137) the speaker-father spends a night with his feverish infant daughter, telling her stories "to guide her home [. . .]." In doing do, he cannot avoid memories of his own past and the false paths that kept him from home for so many years. But those memories have an entirely different context now: "So many ways / to enter the forest and never return. / But happily that's another ending." In another poem, "Bronchitis" (VG 5-7), the father-speaker again watches over a sick child, "All the loose uncertainties of fatherhood [grating] / in the joints of [his] chair" (5). His concerns for his daughter transform him as a reader, reorient his concerns from traditional masculine conceptions of military history toward what we might call a more feminine concern with the effects of war and violence on domesticity and parenting. The emblem of this reorientation in "Bronchitis" is the young girl, a three-year-old, who is the first victim of Sherman's assault on Atlanta, according to the history the speaker reads while his daughter struggles for breath in an adjoining room. The presence of the girl in the narrative makes the speaker question whose story history actually is, if he doesn't even know this girl's name, and

Neither, it seems
does the man who wrote the history,
who mentions her only as a footnote in the abstract
strategies of war. (7)

The speaker and his daughter tour a cemetery in "On Methodist Hill" (VG 8-10), where she continually pulls him toward the graves. He wants to shield her from darkness, death, suffering of all kinds, but she has a natural curiosity that resists his protection. The church setting, the stained-glass representations of Christ and his suffering, prods the narrator to imagine the last supper as a meal to which Christ "had not invited his women, / or his family [. . .]," because he anticipated "some violence" (10). In realizing that all efforts to protect, even the divine, ultimately fail, the speaker finds himself weeping as his "four-year-old climbs a vandalized angel" (10). The adverb that the speaker applies to his tears--"unaccountably" (10)--becomes ironic if we consider this speaker an older, more mature version of the speaker in "Wrestling Angels," the first poem in Armored Hearts. Just as his father was lost to his family for fifteen months during World War II, the speaker has been lost to himself and his family for far longer, that absence characterized by the self of "Wrestling Angels." In watching his child climb on a totem for his own lost years, he cannot escape the possibility that she will someday perhaps be similarly lost to him, an insight that makes his weeping entirely accountable, in fact.¹⁶

The poem which moves Bottoms's exploration of fatherhood beyond the personal to something more akin to the universal is "Night Strategies" (VG 27-28). Here, as the speaker bathes his young daughter, an activity that he figures as a sacrament by making the soap he uses a "wafer" (27), he remembers the story of a young woman raped by soldiers in Sarajevo. The gentleness with which he approaches his female child becomes, then, his answer, his explanation, to her question that he imagines she will necessarily some day articulate to him, the primary male figure in her life:

[. . .] the only answer I have
is this nervous
exaggeration of tenderness,
and that every ministry of my hand, clumsy
and apologetic, asks her
to practice such a radical faith. (28)

In becoming a father, the speaker has practiced his own radical faith, has taken the leap that carries him across the chasm that he once believed to separate him from his own father, from the qualities of fatherhood. On the other side, he finds that additional radicalism is required, both of him and of the child he has brought into a world still marked by the destructive forces of the masculine. His nervous, exaggerated tenderness is all he has to offer by way of explanation. It is simultaneously not nearly enough and everything.¹⁷

In his foreword to Perry Garfinkel's In a Man's World: Father, Son, Brother, Friend, and Other Roles Men Play, Daniel Goleman uses a term taken from Harvard Medical School psychologist Sam Osherson, "shroud of silence," to describe the phenomenon that "enfolds vast areas of men's experience, their emotional lives in particular" (xii). In "Country Store and Moment of Grace" (VG 37-55) Bottoms frames a key question in relation to this shroud of silence: "And what more frightening / than a room of quiet men?" (48).¹⁸ He also uses this characteristic male trait in "A Sunday Dinner" (VG 84-87) to realize for his readers the exact nature of his uncle's and his father's reticence about their war experiences. Although he understands and respects their need for silence, he also indicates that, because they are males who will not or cannot talk, we, their descendants and loved ones, must wait "until the end" (86) to understand what they understand of this life and perhaps the next. These father-figures know parts of the story of us, the human story, that we cannot know. But in assuming his role as purveyor of what he himself knows and what he intuits of their knowledge through his hard-won sympathetic identification with these men and their values, Bottoms approaches Larry May's notion of a moral male who understands "moral responsibility as a matter of what individuals in groups owe their communities" (1).

Bottoms has come back from his own war--a war with self--and refused to wrap himself in that shroud. In raising his voice, he has made his poetry a vehicle for making "gender visible to men," which is, according to Kimmel, a necessary step in the revisionary process contemporary feminism has necessitated in American culture (3). I do not want to suggest that this rendering of gender as visible to men is the only or even the primary accomplishment of Bottoms's work, but to grant to him this valuable by-product of his career. Nor do I believe that the effect of his work is only to make gender visible to men. Rather, I believe that he is also making masculinity visible to women as well as men. Kimmel says, "We need a new definition of masculinity for a new century, a definition that is more about the character of men's hearts and souls than about the size of their biceps or wallets" (333). Ronald F. Levant concurs, arguing that "The only course left was to forge a new middle path between traditional masculinity and the sensitive man ideal--one that allows every man to decide for himself what combination of old and new traits he wants to incorporate into his reconstructed masculine code" (4).

As our culture continues to negotiate the complexities of the paradigm shift in gender roles and expectations that characterized the last quarter of the twentieth century and that continues to complicate our lives today, we could, to paraphrase Robert Frost's "Birches," do worse than to read the poetry of David Bottoms. In reading it through the lens of gender, I believe, we free Bottoms from the stereotypes that have sometimes unfairly limited critical response to his work and concurrently free ourselves from the distorting binary oppositions that similarly limit our thinking about masculinity today.

___________

FOOTNOTES:
¹In their headnote on Ann Beattie, another writer whose career has often been evaluated in terms of her generational identity, the editors of the Norton Anthology of American Literature acknowledge the unfairness of so limiting one's assessment of a writer's body of work. Of Beattie they say, "to stress Beattie's importance as portraitist of a generation may be to do her a disservice, since she is above all else a writer, and one with an unrepresentative, even idiosyncratic, style. Her stories and novels should not be taken merely as vehicles for displaying social attitudes and manners, but as mannerist compositions that need to be not only looked at but listened to. Her style is too pronounced, too carefully contrived, to be treated as a transparent medium through which 'reality' is given us directly" (2529). I want to attach this disclaimer to my own efforts to link Bottoms to his generation, acknowledging that to do so is to skew his work in a specific way. But I undertake that task partly as a corrective measure designed to point out qualities that have been previously overlooked and partly as an opening into other aspects of the work that have been equally neglected or misrepresented.

²This essay is not the place to enter into the debate about what universals there might be that are not somehow socially constructed. Suffice it to say here that Suarez is right in naming Bottoms a poet interested primarily in the individual as it reveals the universal. Bottoms clearly accepts the concept of the universal as it has been traditionally conceived. He, in fact, acknowledges that the chief source of his poetry is his "Southern Baptist education [ . . .] shaped out of a tradition and family model that asks one to believe things that are quite obviously unconfirmable" ("Turn Your Radio On" 86). We can note, however, that even in affirming his traditional conception of the universal Bottoms cites tradition and family, which are both products of the ways we organize ourselves as a society.

³In his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth calls for an return to ethical criticism, a practice that he defines, in part, by a call to revive an ancient metaphor for our relationship with written texts. He suggests that we think of those works as friends, of their authors' gifts to us as friendship offerings. He says, "Perhaps most obviously, this metaphor spontaneously revives a kind of talk, once almost universal, about the types of friendship or companionship a book provides as it is read" (170). He then goes on to acknowledge the reader's role in this metaphorical exchange: "We judge ourselves as we judge the offer. Here is circularity with a vengeance. But we need not fear it as a vicious circle, so long as we do not pursue hard final judgments of 'wicked' or 'blessed' but rather ways of testing and improving our re-creations" (178). For Booth, and for me as I approach the emerging representation of masculinity in Bottoms's work, "ethical criticism [is] any effort to show how the virtues of narratives relate to the virtues of selves and societies, or how the ethos of any story affects or is affected by the ethos--the collection of virtues--of any given reader" (11). I believe Bottoms offers his readers, through his account of his personal evolution as a man, a chance to reconsider masculinity in the late twentieth century, to test and improve our initial re-creations of his poems (and perhaps the poems of other males who take on similar elements of the gender-charged ethos of our time). In this specific way, then, mine is a effort at ethical criticism in Boothian terms.

⁴My argument will depend on examples from only two of Bottoms’s collections, Armored Hearts and Vagrant Grace (1999). Because Armored Hearts contains the poet’s own selections from his three previous books, I believe it represents the best evidence of those poems on which Bottoms wishes his reputation to stand and, thus, also the best evidence of his evolving persona as it relates to my own thesis.

⁵When interviewers Alice Friman and Bruce Gentry asked Bottoms about this epigraph and what it asks of the reader, he responded by saying that it asks nothing of the reader, that only God can do the remaking suggested by the epigraph from Saint Augustine (Friman and Gentry 104). While theologically Bottoms is correct, I want to suggest that metaphorically it is impossible to ignore the epigraph’s invitation for the reader to inhabit the poems as if they were a house and that house itself a metaphor for the poet’s soul. Thus, like Friman and Gentry, I have to believe that the poet is, perhaps unconsciously, asking me via metaphor to assist in the act of remaking named here. For Bottoms’s sense of the relationship between metaphor and poetry in general and his in particular, see "Turn Your Radio On."

Also, to place my sense of Bottoms’s speaker as one who undergoes an evolution in the context of the poet’s broader worldview, see Don Russ’s essay "’Up toward Light’: Resurrection, Transfiguration, Metamorphosis, and Evolution in David Bottoms’s Armored Hearts." Russ makes a convincing argument for a classic post-structural dilemma in the poetry: "Indeed, he draws again and again upon the time-honored Judeo-Christian and classical sources for his imagery, at first ironically, playing up the failure of the older systems of belief, but then increasingly suggesting new hopes and possibilities. And side by side with such biblically cast imagery as that of resurrection and transfiguration and the classical imagery of metamorphosis, the imagery of Darwinian evolution—for many, one would assume, the very antithesis of traditional Western sacred meaning—also comes to suggest something positive, allowing finally some consoling recognition of kinship with all evolved life and thus some sort of salvation from modern isolation, darkness, and despair" (66).

⁶When Bottoms was installed as Georgia’s poet laureate in May 2000, this is the poem he chose for the commemorative broadside distributed to guests on that occasion.

⁷Within his portrait that emphasizes the latter-day Fugitive-Agrarian strain of lament in Bottoms and his work, Skube also details the poet's straightforward acknowledgment that he couldn't live in East Cobb were his wife not a lawyer and his devotion to his ten-year-old daughter that is a departure from the backward-looking nostalgic tone of much else in this journalistic profile. These elements of the present-day Bottoms persona are, for me, even more salient than the more heavily emphasized elements of Skube's characterization because they suggest precisely the evolutionary stage to which Bottoms has come at this point in his career and his real life.

⁸Although my point of departure has been sociological and cultural historical examination of the masculine, it seems imperative to note here that the dynamic I am describing lends itself quite naturally to a psychological reading as well. One might depart from Freud, Lacan, and/or others and produce an equally or more coherent reading. Bottoms’s own professed interest in Jung (see the Friman and Gentry interview, for example) also invites that particular psychological approach.

More than a sociological or cultural historical reading even, mine is a method best described by Michael Dunne in Hawthorne's Narrative Strategies. He acknowledges that he is, in fact, doing his best to describe what he sees happening on the page (19).

⁹Although the level of crime recounted in Bottoms's poetry doesn't come close to murder, the philosophy that emerges in this poem recalls the thinking of Flannery O'Connor's most famous criminal, the Misfit of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." That character says to the terrified grandmother he is about to kill that "[Jesus] thrown everything off balance [by raising the dead]" and goes on to say that, because of that imbalance, one is left with no option other than "[enjoying] the few minutes you got left the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness" (132).

¹⁰One influential use of this metaphor appears in "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," from Thoreau's Walden: "Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. [. . .] The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" (915). By connecting wakefulness to moral reform, Thoreau also provides a helpful link, for purposes of my argument, between poetic perception and the ethical project Booth describes for literature.

¹¹One might, in fact, do a profitable reading of all of Bottoms's fishing poems in terms of their intertextual links to Eliot's Fisher King.

¹²His strategy here is similar to the dreaming capacity of the wives depicted in "The Voice of Wives Dreaming" and, hence, links the speaker to behaviors or imaginative strategies previously identified as female. By representing a breakdown of certain gender barriers that seem fixed in earlier poems, Bottoms begins to foreshadow his ultimate revision of his concepts of masculine and feminine modes of being.

¹³Here is perhaps the best place to note that Bottoms also uses other familial male figures to work toward his reconciliation with the adult male role. Among the most significant examples are poems about his father-in-law (see especially "Last Supper in Montana" [AH 128-29], "The Pentecostal" [AH 130], "Their Father's Tattoo" [VG 33-34] and "Occurrence in the Big Sky" [88-90]); an uncle (see especially "My Uncle Sowing Beatitudes" [VG 81-83] and "A Sunday Dinner" [VG 84-87]); and his grandfather, who appears in several poems in Armored Hearts, as well as being central to "Country Store and Moment of Grace," the long poem that is the centerpiece of Vagrant Grace (37-55). The uncle sticks in the speaker's memory as much for his refusing to engage in a violent exchange with a drunken, angry cousin and for his choosing not to shoot an available deer as for his World War II heroics. The father-in-law, in his unexpected death, becomes an emblem of the imperfectability of one's maleness, the inevitability of one's exiting this life with any number of his male tasks unfinished.

¹⁴In many ways "Armored Hearts" seems an inversion or a deconstruction of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," which also features two neighbors with divergent points of view on an aspect of their properties which ironically connect as well as separate them. Here, Bottoms's speaker, like Frost's, is the more imaginative, the more poetic of the two, and he is able to seize the advantage largely through his being the bearer of the tale. Just as Frost's speaker believes that nature reveals the proper order for the universe, this speaker puts himself forward as a proponent of letting the ducks and turtles settle their varied claims on the ponds "naturally." Frost blames the neighbor in "Mending Wall" for being afraid to question his father's teachings, which provide the basis for his firm belief in the rightness of walls between neighbors. One of the inversions within Bottoms's treatment of similar subject matter and dramatic situation is the implication that this speaker is acting out of reverence for a certain version of masculinity that we, having read his other poems, can attribute to his newfound reconciliation with the father. The neighbor, too, represents a version of masculinity, his inherited from a more traditional and/or less pondered and grasped father figure. The dilemma here is not, as Frost might suggest, to get beyond the father, but to understand and choose the better father, or better aspects of the father.

¹⁵This poem too might be read through an intertextual relationship with "Mending Wall," here complicating even further the issues of separation and connection that interest Frost.

¹⁶Two poems from Vagrant Grace--"Our Presbyterian Christmas" (31) and "My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party" (32)--link the speaker's experience as a parent more directly to his own mother than to his father. In the first of these, Bottoms evokes "The Boy Shepherds' Simile" with its links to his mother's role in his life, and in the second he actually assumes the maternal position, sitting on the sidelines watching his child at an athletic event: "I remembered my sweet exasperated mother." In coming, as a father, to a fuller understanding of both the male and the female roles in parenting, Bottoms indicates one key aspect of the new version of masculinity that he is embracing.

¹⁷In this poem Bottoms does much to counter or place in context perhaps his most disturbing poem regarding male dominance of the female, "The Farmers" (AH 12-13). A rape poem, perhaps influenced by Dickey's "May Day Sermon" and "Cherrylog Road," "The Farmers" employs an uncharacteristic third-person narration notable for the aesthetic detachment the narrator enjoys. The assault on the female, like the assaults on graveyard angels and dump rats in poems from the same phase in the poet's career, is a communal experience, a gang rape, marked by an inhuman disregard for the woman's humanity. After the men satisfy themselves, the woman watches them return to their "reaping" in the fields. Thus, Bottoms links linguistically their work life as male farmers and their approach to this woman: raping and reaping are two sides of the same coin, just as the Sarajevo soldiers who rape the woman in "Night Strategies" see her as one of the many spoils due a warrior. The use of his characteristic first-person and, more importantly, his ability to see his personal connection to the abstraction of masculinity represented in the actions of the soldiers in the later poem, even as he is personally at his most gentle and loving with the daughter, suggest an ideological maturity to match his personal growth.

¹⁸This long poem, by far the longest Bottoms has published to date, deserves its own extensive examination, a task space does not permit here. However, it is central to my argument in that the speaker reflects on both present-day experience and childhood memories, coming to terms with the South's racial history, among other things, through his re-examination of the integration of his grandfather's store, with a group of men as silent witnesses to the grandfather's exchange with a black woman buying a soft drink. The boy speaker, too, is a silent witness, but as an adult he voices, like a refrain, in the poem's final section the word "Amen" (53-55). In its more literal meaning of "so be it" as well as the colloquial sense of "I agree" common to southern use of the word, "Amen" indicates the speaker's (re)affirmation of traditional values, as learned from his male relatives, even in light of his subsequent lived experience and the lived experience of his region and his nation. Through his inscription to three male contemporaries, Bottoms also suggests that the "Amen" he speaks is not his alone, but that of any number of males who have shared his experience of time and place.

I assume that future critics will turn their attention to the full analysis that this major work deserves.

__________

Works Cited

"Ann Beattie." In Baym. 2529-30.

Barnes, Roy. Introduction of David Bottoms. Poet Laureate Inauguration Ceremony. Atlanta, GA. 31 May 2000.

Baym, Nina, and others, eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 5^th ed. New York: Norton, 1999.

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Bottoms, David. Armored Hearts. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1995.

---. "Turn Your Radio On: The Spirits of Influence." Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1999): 85-92.

---. Vagrant Grace. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1999.

Bryant, William Cullen. "Thanatopsis." In Baym. 471-73.

Dubbert, Joe L. A Man's Place: Masculinity in Transition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979.

Dunne, Michael. Hawthorne's Narrative Strategies. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.

Eliot, T. S. "The Waste Land." In Baym. 2048-60.

Friman, Alice, and Bruce Gentry. "Fishing from the Poetry Boat: A Conversation with David Bottoms." Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1999): 93-105.

Frost, Robert. "Birches." In Baym. 1867-68.

---. "Mending Wall." In Baym. 1859-60.

Garfinkel, Perry. In a Man's World: Father, Son, Brother, Friend, and Other Roles Men Play. New York: NAL, 1985.

Gerzon, Mark. A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Faces of American Manhood. New York: Houghton, 1982.

Goldberg, Herb. The New Male: From Macho to Sensitive But Still All Male. New York: NAL, 1979.

Hill, Robert W. "Warbling with TV in the Background: David Bottoms in the Suburbs." Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1999): 80-84.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free, 1996.

Levant, Dr. Ronald F. Masculinity Reconstructed: Changing the Rules of Manhood--At Work, in Relationships, and in Family Life. New York: Plume, 1995.

May, Larry. Masculinity and Morality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998.

O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Complete Stories. New York: Noonday, 1971. 117-33.

Russ, Don. "'Up toward Light': Resurrection, Transfiguration, Metamorphosis, and Evolution in David Bottoms's Armored Hearts." Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1999): 66-72.

Skube, Michael. "Simply Grounded: Georgia's New Poet Laureate." Atlanta Journal-Constitution 31 May 2000: F1-2.

Suarez, Ernest. "A Deceptive Simplicity: The Poetry of David Bottoms." Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1999): 73-79.

Thoreau, Henry David. In Baym . 868-967.

[This page posted for use by RWH's ENGL 1101-H3 class, Fall 2000.--RWH, 9/14/2000]