The winning volume in the 1988 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Out of the Woods by Thomas Bolt. As James Merrill, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said: "Here is an up-to-date pastoral: wrecked cars, glades of debris, polluted streams, all gravely held in Thomas Bolt's unflinching gaze. 'I had found,' he writes, 'the secret center of America.' Given this wealth of evidence, its bleakness and sparkle, we can almost bring ourselves to believe him."
A Hill in Virginia
In this rude world
Memory pertains
In bald things,
Of promises skipped over, violence
Or accidents of kissing.
Read within the deep patina
Of the old stump
Of a shainsawed black walnut
Its circular
History from sex to ruin;
Look where
Cracked and spattered chunks of cold quartz
Stuck in mud
Glitter up from a dull hill.
Downhill, the wrecked car:
A punched in windshield
Sags whole,
An afterimage of collision,
Brilliant with sky.
