Beyond the Reach: poems - Softcover

Cummins, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1886157383 ISBN 13: 9781886157385

Publisher: BKMK Press, 2005

Synopsis

Poetry. "Cummins is a poet with both hands in plain sight. No manipulative literary affectations, no illustrations oftheory, no personal mission other than to address us directly, with clarity, authenticity, and above all, with generosity"--Ted Kooser.

About this title

About the Author

Deborah Cummins is the author of a poetry chapbook, From the Road It Looks Like Paradise. Her awards include James A. Michener and Donald Barthelme fellowships, the Washington Prize in Fiction, the Headwaters Literary Prize, Illinois Arts Council fellowships and awards, and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Ragdale, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Now president of the Modern Poetry Association, she has also been an Arts-in-Education artist with the Illinois Arts Council, writer-in-residence at The Menil Collection museum in Houston, Texas, and lecturer at The University of Chicago. She has directed writing workshops at Northwestern University and at Chicago s Museum of Contemporary Art, Terra Museum of American Art, and Newberry Library. She resides with her husband, Bob, in Evanston, Illinois, and Deer Isle, Maine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the White Mountains

All these trees and leaves, and each bears
no resemblance to any other. I'd have to describe
each one. And because the wind gusts up or the sun
disappears behind a cloud, I'd need to update
every description by the minute, a task
harder than Monet's. Then there's the matter
of imperceptible decay, of obsolescence, winter
due to arrive any second.

Perhaps if I stayed with color,
the yellows and oranges, the russets,
occasional purples, and, of course, the greens,
the partly greens, greens closer to yellow,
a full spectrum of hue, all manners of comparisons possible:
to gourds and squashes, citrus and grain,
to flame and flowers, stars I've yet to learn to name.
And naming the colors - ochre, cadmium, citron, chrome -
might make it more specific, might arrest,
for an instant, autumn's dazzling passage.

As if that's what I'm after: language's momentary stasis.
As if the adjectives for leaves I labor with -
dappled, mottled, marbled, splotched - might keep
this gold-disked birch from squandering all its currency.
It's not enough: reaching into the jeweler's bag,
stretching for the anvil of the metalsmith,
all those pavés, mosaics, and cloisonnés to capture
this luminosity, this voracious clarity
of unnameable golden light.

On this white escarpment I've dragged
my shadow to, at this confluence of yellow mountain
and blue inveterate sky, against this elaborate dialogue
where no boundaries blur, and nothing obfuscates
to what end beneath their golden splendor these trees will come,
I recognize this attempt at description
as elegy, lament.
But nothing dying needs to be so lavish.
Nothing dying needs such fire.
It's the living I stand before, this ferocious burning.

Edition details

• Publisher: BKMK Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1886157383
• ISBN 13: 9781886157385
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 84