Description
Robert B. Cumming, the longtime publisher of Iris Press, has been writing poetry for over twenty-five years. After All collects some of Cumming’s sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and free verse. He uses smooth, surprising language to create pleasing musical effects. Cumming explores the universal themes of memory, aging, mortality, and loss, especially in those poems honoring his late wife, Carmen. Despite his work’s elegiac, evocative content, After All avoids a sentimental approach to these challenging subjects. These poems celebrate life in the face of its impending absence.
Praise for After All
In 1996, Bob Cumming bought Iris Press and began publishing some of the best poets of our region, including two of my favorites, George Scarbrough and Cathy Smith Bowers. The books themselves—covers, formats, fonts—are works of art. Bob has rendered a great service to poets and poetry lovers alike. Yet Bob is also a poet, one whose modesty and selflessness have kept him from publishing his own work. With this volume, we now realize that Bob is a gifted poet as well as publisher. The craft of these poems is impressive: metrics and complex rhyme patterns (as in the villanelle “Long-Distance Runner”) are deftly achieved, and as Dylan Thomas in “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” and Elizabeth Bishop in “One Art” have exemplified, the formal restraint intensifies the poems’ emotional power. Nevertheless, what is most memorable in these elegiac poems is their hard-won sentiment. They are never mawkish or self-pitying, but they are great-hearted, especially in their honoring of the love between Bob and his late wife Carmen. This collection shows a side of Bob we’ve always sensed was there but never seen so fully revealed. As are so many writers, I am proud to have been published by Iris Press. I am equally proud that Bob is my friend.
—Ron Rash, author of Serena and In the Valley
Yes, life is short and unpredictable, but when the love for Carmen enters Bob’s poems, the dear nature of life is formed. Sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, filled with superb original nouns and verbs, create musical, melodious sounds that often blend, often jump out. Please read these aloud as well as silently to hear your own voice capture their grace. The sounds themselves will harmonize your soul.
—Bill Brown, author of The Headless Angel and Late Winter
