The Meeting Place

by Dede Cummings

In  The Meeting Place , the speaker looks out from our coasts, east, and the unbounded sky, the sheltering coves, the sand and rocks, the spartina grass growing and blowing in the sand. The title, as the opening poem makes clear, refers to the Algonquian word  Wantastiquet , for the place where two rivers meet, with the titular poem also serving as a land acknowledgment. The collection continues with a series depicting childhood and a first kiss, the tension and tenderness of sisterhood, neighborhood and family dynamics, and stories that mesh Irish history with her beloved family. What follows is a mix of memories and present-day meditations, often personal and always benefiting from a keen poetic eye for observation, along with the occasional lyrical flourish. Hiking mountains and trails offer the poet such transformative surprises found in nature that lead her to discover the world — "my prism" — and welcome us to share the New England life she loves. These are quiet poems that exude grace.

102 pages, Paperback

Published March 19, 2020

About the author

Dede Cummings is a writer, award-winning book designer, publisher, and former commentator for Vermont Public Radio. At Middlebury College, she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an undergraduate fellow. In 1991, she received a fellowship to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, she returned as a poetry contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, Connotation Press, MomEgg Review, Green Mountains Review, among others, and anthologized in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry and Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection. She was a Discover/The Nation poetry semi-finalist. In 2016, she was awarded a writer’s grant from the Vermont Studio Center. Her first poetry collection entitled To Look Out From was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was published in 2017. Her second poetry collection, The Meeting Place, was published in 2020 by Salmon Poetry. Dede lives in Vermont, where she designs books and is the founder and publisher of www.greenwriterspress.com, a global press devoted to environmental activism, social justice, and sustainable publishing.

Dede lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, in a house built by her husband, Steve Carmichael. They have three children, Sam, Emma, and Joey. After Dede's most recent hospital stay and surgery for Crohn's disease in 2006, she began hiking the Long Trail (the length of Vermont) in one week sections, beginning to realize a long-term goal that had been put off due to illness.

Living With Crohn's & Colitis was her first published book. Her second book, "Cooking Well: IBS" came out October 25, 2011, and it is a description of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), and a helpful guide with lifestyle tips and over 100 recipes. The author was first diagnosed with IBS in her 20s, and it is her hope that by reading these books, people will become educated and informed about how lifestyle and diet are key to maintaining health in today's world. Book Number Three in this series is The Living With Crohn's & Colitis Cookbook.

Dede has published organic and holistic lifestyle series for Skyhorse, including The Medicinal Gardening Handbook, The Organic Gardening Handbook, and The Good Living Guide to Beekeeping.

Reviews

[Emily Benson-Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a lot of poetry, and Dede Cummings’ poetry stays with me. It both consoles and haunts. Her poems are gorgeously grounded in this earth and revel in the sensuality of being alive. At the same time, they contain intimations of sadness, grief, and mortality —like the empty canning jars in “Putting Food By,” waiting to be filled with “achingly red Roma tomatoes’”
The poet notes those empty jars “erect and waiting,” shining in the sun, also speak of “something unutterable and pitiful: loneliness, cancer, death, mourning.” But if these poems allow in shadows of mortality, they whiplash us back to the eternal present moment with jarring visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory even gustatory imagery. Her poems ferry us back to the here and now— instruct us to imagine what it will be like to open the jars mid-winter where eternal summer will spring forth and a “sweet yet tangy smell will engulf you (not unlike the smell after sex)”
Dede Cummings’ poems in her stunning collection The Meeting Place, seem to instruct us to posit life, the fruits of the earth against the fact of our finitude, so the red tomatoes will always triumph over the bleakness of winter, will contrast brilliantly with the “white field with your wood pile having come down to a skeletal sculpting.”
Then there is “Zun Zun” about the Cuban hummingbird the smallest on earth, the imagery in that poem so alive we feel the heat and see it too, on “the shadow-rippled porch in the blazing sun.” We feel the sound and fury of that bird echoing through our brief human lives, as “the sound of Zun-Zun buzzes in [the poet’s] brain,” and she speaks of plans to “dance in the streets of Havana.”
Dede Cummings’ gift for figurative language graces so many poems — like the metaphor of the lighthouse beacon in “The First Thing is the Breeze.” As the poet processes the grief of her father’s passing, she notices how the beacon “twirls and flashes bright,” how “there is warning and safety all in one swoop.”
Offering us a wise and sane worldview, but not cynical, the poet takes solace in the gifts of the earth, the breeze “tumbling around [her] shoulders, not quite a caress more like an eager lover with rough-hewn palms”. And the book too is full of birdsong reminding us to “sink into sound” as “fleeting summer days [are] already growing shorter.”
There are nods to Keats in this collection and this poet is a kindred spirit showing us, as Keats did, that “the poetry of the earth is ceasing never.”