Until They Catch Fire

“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*
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REVIEWs for until they catch fire

“Irrefutable and overwhelming absence in poet Deborah Cummins’ latest collection”

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD, January 2021

“Overall a brilliant collection, in turn intimate and universal, full of insight and intelligence. Open it and be moved.”

The Café Review, April 2021

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Deborah Cummins & Stuart Kestenbaum in Conversation

“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 fire, 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

Past Publications

Here and Away (essays)

2012

In the summer of 1995, after years of being deeply but inexplicably drawn to northeast Maine from her native Midwest, Deborah Cummins traveled to Deer Isle, an island in eastern Penobscot Bay. In this gathering of personal essays and lyrical meditations that span several years during which this summer visitor becomes a cottage renter and finally a homeowner, Cummins invites readers to join in her journey of discovery and deepening connection, an eloquent exploration of the meaning of home and the difference between being from someplace and of a place. Newly but firmly planted in an island landscape of granite ledges, spruce forests, ever-changing tidal shorelines, pocked mudflats, miniscule islets, and a beloved garden — among fellow inhabitants that include lobstermen, artists, deft arborists, and a laconic plumber, as well as ospreys, crows, a fox family, and an old dog — Cummins also unearths memories of her childhood and Midwestern roots, artfully weaving present and past. Confronted by unexpected loss, she is increasingly sustained by the knowledge that his small island has become her “belonging-place.”

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Counting the Waves (poetry)

Word Press, 2006

“‘Go count the waves,’/a mother solemnly intones, and somewhere,/beneath a high, hot sun, a child might obey,/discovering, as he loses count, the waves’/myriad glittery eyes.” So, too, the world in Deborah Cummins’ Counting the Waves becomes dazzlingly, startlingly renewed and transformed through her close scrutiny; these carefully wrought poems, as sharply incised as cut diamonds, glitter with an incandescent light.

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Beyond The Reach, (poetry)

BkMk Press, 2002

“Deborah Cummins shows us how lovely—truly elegant—and frightening it is to experience the moments where the natural and human worlds intersect and inevitably and achingly part. Beyond the Reach is a remarkable first book, reaching far beyond most, because of the distilled clarity and beauty of its language and its intelligent and haunting, philosophical range.” —Susan Hahn