Deerbrook Editions

Until They Catch Fire

Deborah Cummins

ISBN: 978-1-7343884-5-9

6 x 9; 84 pages; $18.00
Unfortunately we are low on Deborah's title, but spdbooks.org has several copies available, and individuals can order from them.

visit the authors Website 

Deborah Cummins is the author of a poetry chapbook, From The Road It Looks Like Paradise, two poetry collections, Beyond the Reach and Counting the Waves, and a collection of personal essays, Here and Away: Discovering Home on an Island in Maine. Her poems and essays have appeared in nine anthologies and more than sixty journals and magazines, including Orion, Fourth Genre, Gettysburg Review, Yale Review and Shenandoah. One of her essays was listed as Notable in 2013 Best American Essays. Originally from Chicago, she was the first board chair of the Poetry Foundation. She currently serves as board president of Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA). She and her husband reside in Portland and Deer Isle, Maine.

Endorsed by David Jauss

A memory, Deborah Cummins tells us, is a mind-painting, and she paints her memories with the precision and beauty of the Old Masters. Until They Catch Fire is a gallery of stunning mind-paintings, many of them about the heart-rending loss of her brother and mother. Their absence is a palpable presence in these poems, but ultimately the book is, as the title of one poem puts it, “A Griever’s Reference Manual,” and it can help us fellow grievers face down the darkness and begin to rise again, like green shoots of grass after a fi re, into the beautiful “cathedral of light” that is this world. These are essential poems. Do not miss them.

—David Jauss, author of Improvising Rivers and You Are Not Here

 

Endorsed by Andrea Hollander

An alternate title for this accomplished full-length collection might well be “The New Order of Things,” the name of one of the book’s many poems that attempt to make peace with “the presence of an absence.” As she faces loss, especially that of her brother (“I was older than [he] would ever be”), Cummins memorably captures the vexation of not being able to prevent, even delay, the inevitable. Her territory is woefully our territory, too, and these poems give voice to what we all experience as we struggle “to accommodate the truth.” Part elegy, part love poem, Until They Catch Fire is an impressive collection by an always impressive writer.

—Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky

 

Endorsed by Betsy Sholl

Something well made can bring real solace in a time of grief, and that’s what these new poems by Deborah Cummins are—beautifully rendered moments of awareness and astute responses to the many questions loss raises. There are no easy answers here, but rather a compelling journey as the self realigns after the death of a brother gone too soon and a mother never fully known. This is a book of transformations, and there is an astonishing amount of light in these poems—window light, candlelight, lamplight, firelight, sunlight. The poet’s touch also is light and full of wonder, writing about the natural world with such precise language we can see in detail a moth on the screen, the intricate pattern of its “flocked arrangement of dust.” Cummins is alert to everything in these poems, and thus becomes a kind of Virgil for us, a wise, attentive guide through the darkness that propels us “not toward death, but into radiant life."

—Besty Sholl, author of House of Sparrows