Synopses & Reviews
Cummins's quiet, lunatic meditations--wait, that should be luminous meditations--are great fun. From father-son stuff, and women grousing about that sentimentality, to killing someone in your basement, or turning into a locust, or imagining his wife's violent death, Cummins hasn't lost his touch. Though he does lose his hand in one of these. Maybe it should be numinous meditations? In various emergencies?
Review
Harms' poems display an amazing fidelity to the personal here and now, and at the same time to the national history and landscape. . . . I think of Larry Levis saying, "To follow my imagination is my only real duty." This Harms does beautifully in ways that touch off possibilities in our heads as we read.
-The Charleston Gazette
In poem after poem, [Harms] shows the way we bridge the gaps between private mind and public world and move from alienation to connection. The poems' speakers reach, over and over again, to push us and themselves beyond disillusionment.
-Willow Springs
Review
James Harms' poems have always posited the dailiness of any revelation. . . . He wants to remind us that many of the grandest things available to us can be had for even the smallest gesture.
-David St. John
Over the course of five books of poetry, James Harms has created a poetic that weds the personal and public and moves deftly from narrative to lyric, often blurring the lines between these modes.
-Shara McCallum, The Antioch Review
He is a poet of the dramatic vignette, wonderfully able to conjure a scene, its characters, and its emotional and psychological aura so vividly that each poem become immediately indelible; on rereading, its situation comes rushing back virtually full-force.
-Booklist
James Harms is one of the truly visionary and restless voices of our time.
-Laura Kasischke
Review
James Cummins' Still Some Cake is filled with brilliant poems--"This Night of All Nights," "My Father's Hair," "The Greatest Generation," "The War of All Against All," and "Moses"--to name just some of the longer ones--written in an effortless, fluent style that presents surprises in almost every line. But the book transcends its individual poems, as its recurring obsessions--the burdens of the proximity of those closest to us, including ourselves--surface and resurface in the context of the family romance, history and war, the solitary, violent imagination, the narrative of the Bible--to create a fugue-like whole, by turns harrowing and exhilarating. Still Some Cake is one of the most powerful books in recent memory.
-John Koethe
Better than any American poet of his generation, Cummins, in a voice fierce, simple, and matter of fact, writes nakedly of men and violence, men and their fathers, men and their friends, men and the women and children they love. His command of formalism is still as impressive as it is unobtrusive, and with it he renders the self--that's all of us--and our human longing to speak our truth nakedly and to be whole. I read this book, and am astonished and graced.
-Marilyn Krysl
Synopsis
In Comet Scar, James Harms blends closely observed scenes from domestic life with meditations on music, film, politics, and society, intent on dissolving the membrane that separates the realms of culture and the quotidian.
About the Author
James Cummins was born in Ohio and grew up in the Midwest. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first book, The Whole Truth, a sequence of sestinas about the Perry Mason characters, was reissued in 2003 in the Classic Contemporary Series at Carnegie Mellon University Press. His other books include Portrait in a Spoon, Then and Now, and, co-authored with David Lehman, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man, a collection of the poets' sestinas. He is curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection at the University of Cincinnati, and is married to the poet Maureen Bloomfield.