Beyond the Reach

By Deborah Cummins

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,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1886157383
• ISBN13: 9781886157385
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kans
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Reaching beyond

Deborah Cummins has named her book well. The serious precision of her poetry does reach beyond, look deeply into familiar landscapes, revisit people and situations from her past with renewed insights and with both irony and compassion. She can bring old Mrs. Alekna to life as a child saw her, with her holy cards and fascinating "brisly goiter/ Already the size of an orange." Cummins can be a social critic also, as in "Cody, Barnes & Wentworth" where she remembers being a professional woman among male colleagues and "summons my old voice from bedroom to office." First and foremost, Cummins is a fine poet of nature and landscape, particularly the Maine coast. These of her poems have a beautiful, elegaic quality, like shadows on a lawn, as when "just before nightfall" she loves "the brief flare of luminous light,/its almost saving grace." Always aware that it is "almost" saving, Deborah Cummins nonetheless brings her poems to us in this book with real grace.