My Dim Aviary
Praise
Through the voice of Miss Fernande—Parisian model, prostitute, rumored mistress of Picasso—Gillian Cummings creates a series of exquisite prose poems, thick with longing, loneliness, and corporal beauty. “What color would God clothe me but red?” Cummings asks, offering the body as both wound and source of pleasure, and later, “There is a place the soul goes when the body is a field lost to burning.” My Dim Aviary is that place. Reader, I implore you to visit.
Allison Benis White
Written under the sign of cauchemar, nightmare, My Dim Aviary inhabits and envoices the mind of the mysterious Fernande, the model who posed for photographer Jean Agélou’s erotic postcards. Creating a voluptuary with humane intent and pathos, Cummings channels Fernande: “So you can guess what I smell like, so you can have more than a glimpse of the girl who won’t, though she undresses, unfold herself from the flat paperboard of the card.” In prose poems of Pre-Raphaelite opulence, lexically rich and layered with French, Cummings blurs the distinction between sacred and profane, the cusp of childhood and adulthood, the divide between voyeurism and performance. These poems return the reader to the kharis in “eucharist,” the offering of grace, because “If beauty becomes unbearable, then there’s ruin for the world’s welter of white …” At times almost unbearably lavish, at times harrowing in their exposure of abuse and exploitation, these poems unsettle the nightmare with hope: “Maybe in what you cannot forgive, a small space opens, like the first glimpse of blue when clouds break after weeks of rain.”
B.K. Fischer
Few books offer the rigor and delirium of myth. Few books are both dreamt and crafted. Gillian Cummings has written one. Her words themselves seem to tremble with the ache of individuation, the estrangement of sexuality–“a swan gouging its breast with its bill.” Searing in its originality, My Dim Aviary is a masterful conception, a trance, a prayer of abandonment.