CONQUERING INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL

Cummings wrestles with despair, spiritual reflection, and family ties in this intimate poetry book.

From the very beginning, it’s fairly evident that melancholy will be a major theme in Cummings’ collection. Black thoughts seep into the early poems in lines like, “My car remains, a husk of a home / Evaporated gas and shattered glass / Dissuade me from starting anything.” In “Half a Mind,” the speaker fantasizes about designing a wedding ring for a restless bedfellow and goes on to lament the way families grow distant, relatives get older, and memories fade in “I Miss the Color.” Writing about writing also becomes a recurring theme, Cummings proclaims that poetry is “my spark, a heaven-sent passion.” But the creeping melancholy and self-esteem issues drift into his poetry again like dark storm clouds: he admits his writing feels “pointless,” and he sees his “heartfelt ink a useless puddle at the bottom of / the page.” Somehow faith and God make an appearance as well, the thoughts of which provide the speaker with some small comfort, as seen in lines like, “I grind my teeth under this burden, but do not flee / For God, dissatisfied with mere stars, made me.” Cummings does a commendable job of infusing his poems with vivid sensory details, like how “The river sloshes silently / Foaming at the mouth” or “Short-lived snowflakes scatter over brown leaves.” He boldly experiments with form in poems like “Rest in Peace,” in which each line begins with “R” (and the book’s rhyming poems are equally inventive). The poems about his mother are particularly poignant and feature some oddly affecting memories, like how she plucked a Lego man out of his milk. However, some poems, like “A Thing Such As This,” in which the poet states, “I broke it, so now it's broken / A thing such as this / Has no quick-fix” are oblique to the point that the reader feels too distanced from the overall sentiment.

Well-conceived—although occasionally abstruse—poems that appeal to the heart and mind in equal measure.