After All

Robert B. Cumming has written poetry for over twenty-five years, and he is also the publisher of Iris Press. This collection gathers his work across several forms, including sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, and free verse. His language moves smoothly and then turns somewhere unexpected, and the sound of the lines is deliberately musical.

The poems return to subjects most readers eventually face: memory, growing older, mortality, and loss. Many of them honor his late wife, Carmen.

Even when the poems dwell on grief, they avoid sentimentality. Taken together, they affirm life while acknowledging that its end is approaching.