Petals as an Offering in Darkness
Praise
What a modestly beautiful book this is!–the emphasis being on both its modest nature and its depth of beauty. This is a collection of poems dedicated wholly to God—not to God’s namesake nor to any creed, but a work that wonders, humbly, about faith in a midst of uncertain beauty. The poems are shaped, craft-wise, beseeching, and stunningly earth-bound. Cummings’ imagery is an alleluhia; the writing is a graceful epistle, in the Rilkean sense: true letters sent to us and to that Unknown Known. I will read and re-read Petals as an Offering in Darkness as I wait for Gillian Cummings’ next book.
Kate Knapp Johnson, author of Wind Somewhere, and Shade
“Tell me, tell me what will last,” begins one poem in Petals as an Offering in Darkness, by Gillian Cummings. Here is what will last: these poems. Cummings’ voice is a rare blend of the humble and the visionary. Indelibly she paints the complex splendors of earth, and the questions they pose about spirit, both in this life and beyond. Cummings writes of “the brushstrokes of Monet’s Japanese bridge,/where bridge dissolves into no-bridge as if paint/were true fire and burned through the seen/with the force of the artist’s yearning.” Any good reader will be left yearning for the next collection by Gillian Cummings.