"The title of this new collection from J. David Cummings suggests a forensic investigation, or perhaps an archeological dig - and both are apt metaphors for these poems, which indeed do probe into mysteries and unearth the past, in this case the poet's very personal and sometimes painful past. Not incidentally, Cummings is a theoretical physicist by training, a field devoted to elucidating hidden order out of the ineffable, and that background serves him well as he applies the instrumentalities of poetry to the dark matter of the heart. Likewise, the title of his long central poem "Praise…mehr
"The title of this new collection from J. David Cummings suggests a forensic investigation, or perhaps an archeological dig - and both are apt metaphors for these poems, which indeed do probe into mysteries and unearth the past, in this case the poet's very personal and sometimes painful past. Not incidentally, Cummings is a theoretical physicist by training, a field devoted to elucidating hidden order out of the ineffable, and that background serves him well as he applies the instrumentalities of poetry to the dark matter of the heart. Likewise, the title of his long central poem "Praise Dust" suggests both the "star stuff" out of which we are composed - "the ceaseless anarchy of the small invisible" - and the final destiny of all flesh. "Praise equation / and number, poem and song" he proclaims, and if this seems an odd juxtaposition of head and heart, it isn't really - for like physics, poetry deals in both precision and abstraction. Cummings wields his verse like a finely calibrated tool, delicately peeling back layers of memory to expose meaning. Near the end of this intensely personal process he finds his "self / Still the flickering illusion, the question mark," encompassed by "the loud silence" of being - not an ominous silence, but "the quiet inside a poem, when words / Align in the innocence, when an old hand gathers." What Cummings has gathered here, the bones of truth that he has handled, reveal a common humanity - how the story of every one life enlightens everyone's life"--
J. David Cummings worked as a theoretical physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for more than ten years. Some years later, after visiting the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, he began writing the poems that culminated in his book, Tancho, which Alicia Ostriker chose to win the Ashland Poetry Press Richard Snyder Publication Prize in 2013. His long poem, "Praise Dust" was one of five selected for honors by the W.B. Yeats Society of New York in its 2018 annual competition. Judge Leslie McGrath said of the poem that it "... conjures out of lush sounds the smallness of the self when backgrounded by eternity." His poems, whether interrogating the world-historical event of the atomic bombings and their long aftermath, delving deeply into the mysteries of human psychology (sometimes with metaphors stolen from physics), or re-membering his own complex and difficult family history, are heart-centered, searingly honest, and layered with multiple meanings. He believes poems must have music, passion, and beauty, and strives to imbue his work with those qualities. He lives in Menlo Park, California with his wife Christine and a house full of books.
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