An Introduction to Gillian Cummings by Kristina Marie Darling


Gillian Cummings is an exciting voice in contemporary poetry. For Cummings, the poetic image serves as a doorway to larger questions about perception, the ever-porous boundary between self and world, and the power of language in shaping sensory experience. It is clear from such accomplished collections as The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter and My Dim Aviary that Cummings has a gift for cultivating dialogue between philosophy and the lyric. In this folio, impressionistic and gorgeously rendered glimpses of the natural world evoke a “the other side of ourselves,” “this cloud within the room.” More specifically, Cummings draws upon “a few stars,” and “the blue vault of morning,” to reveal an unsettling strangeness within the speaker of these eloquent poems. This is a folio that you won’t soon forget.

Gillian Cummings is the author of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and My Dim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press. Her most recent chapbook is The Shy Yellow (Dharma Pine Editions, 2023), a letterpress edition of twenty copies. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The Cimarron Review, The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, and in other journals and four anthologies, including The Best of Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Catskill, New York, where she is editing her first novel and trying, tentatively, to learn to play the cello.