Meet the Author

Davis McCombs began work on "Tobacco Mosaic" about two years after the completion of his first book, Ultima Thule. For those two years, McCombs says, "I felt rudderless, without direction, and I ended up not writing much of anything." Then, reading John Clare, and moved by the poet's "urge to capture the vanishing rural life of the Northamptonshire countryside around him," he thought of the culture of burley tobacco farming that was vanishing from his own hometown of Munfordville, Kentucky. "I felt overwhelmed by the loss of this beautiful way of life, by the loss of the intimate, complex craft involved in growing and curing a crop of burley tobacco, and I knew then what I had to do."

McCombs comes from a long and storied line of tobacco farmers. He is the great-great-great grandson of Bartholomew Bennett Gaddie (known as "Bat Gaddie" in the poem), who, by the turn of the twentieth century, McCombs explains, "was considered one of the finest growers of burley tobacco in the state and was commissioned by the government in Frankfort to send a hogshead of his tobacco to the Centennial Exposition in St. Louis."

Writing the poems for "Tobacco Mosaic" was "like coming home," McCombs says. He was able to make use of a lexicon new to many readers—words like fescue, tedder and stob. "It felt so natural to me to write using that vocabulary. I grew up hearing those words, speaking them."

Not a smoker himself, McCombs says that part of the impetus behind writing "Tobacco Mosaic" was to come to terms with the moral and ethical dilemmas posed by the formative role that tobacco has played in his life. "When, as a young man, I would rail against the evils of tobacco, my mother would remind me that, as she put it, 'Tobacco paid for your education.' She was right, of course—and for years I have carried with me the sense that every word I write is in some way sponsored by tobacco."