News & Opinion

Well, I have a birthday coming up and haven't even gotten my act together to set up an Evite. On the other hand, Daniel Blumen, who will celebrate his bar mitzvah in May, put together a video invitation featuring cameos by mayor Kasim Reed, Frank Ski, and Ne-Yo—along with a charmingly awkward version of Jermaine Dupri's "Welcome to Atlanta."

David Bottoms, who turned sixty-two on September 11, has been Georgia’s poet laureate since 2000. In 2009, he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, honoring a body of work that blends narrative and lyrical poetry inspired by domestic life and mystical notions. One recent afternoon, he was putting sunflowers in a vase while he talked about his latest collection of poems, We Almost Disappear.All of your collections have a very distinctive tone. How would you characterize this one? This one is kind of an old person’s book. As you get older—you’ll know this someday—you start to think about different things. I remember seeing [James] Dickey just a few months before he died, at a party for him over at Emory, and he just looked at me. He had a big glass of chocolate milk—he had given up alcohol finally—and he said out of the blue, “David, there’s nothing more important than family.” I thought that was kind of an irony, since he had done just about everything in his life to destroy his family. And it was totally out of context.But evidently that’s what obsessed him late in life. I get that now.Some of the most moving poems in this book are about your father in the last years of his life. After he died [in 2009], they figured out he had leukemia. We didn’t even know that. He was in terrible pain, and all he ever took for it was Tylenol. He just ate Tylenol like candy. And he just sort of withered away. It was long and painful, and he wouldn’t go to the doctor.His name was David Bottoms, too? Yes, I am a Junior, although I never used it. It was just too much trouble.Your mother is still living? She is eighty-five and living in the family home in Canton. She’s very frail, but she won’t leave the house.Now that you think about such things, how do you feel about getting older? Well, you know, you’re blessed to be able to get older. I’m very happy where I am in my life.