Publisher's Synopsis
We live in an age of terror, literally and metaphorically. Old dependables have been shaken loose and to free us from the terror comes the poetry of The Rapture - poetry with a tangible exultance and joy tinged with the dark matter of End Times and the pinching fear of what's up ahead wrestling with the pleasures and shelter of the moment - our internal clocks striking the hours of the age of anxiety in us all.
The Rapture is divided into three parts, each exploring sensation, identity, immersion and memory in its own way. Chapel of Carbon includes love poems, lyrics, outrageous metaphors and narratives alongside wide-screen, more open-field works that probe at our very sense of self and perception.
The central Improvisations section tests language and meaning's outer reaches and its most intimate fumblings. These are poems that tear down the fences and break open the windows and doors. This is not the hand-me-down formalism of the writing workshop, but in the power and sudden impact in the work's vivid mosaic of image, character, narrative and metaphor conspiring together to make you seriously question assumptions of what form and meaning actually are.
The final First Music is the most autobiographical of Cumming's published work, an exploration of the matter of memory, and the act of remembering as well as the experience of returning to the landscape of one's past. It evokes the way of life and of imagination on a remote Dartmoor farm in the 60s and 70s, a study of memory and the process of remembering and perception as well as of capturing the landscape and aura of England's wildest landscape, littered with ghosts and strange tokens, stranger tales and prehistoric artefacts.
