Here and Away

Merritt Ireland. Rev. Here and Away: Discovering Home on an Island in Maine by Deborah Cummins. Rockland, ME: Maine Authors Publishing, 2012.
        Deborah Cummins made a name for herself as a poet from the Midwest before publishing this collection of essays, Here and Away. It is a book of place, Deer Isle in eastern Penobscot Bay, Maine, to be specific, where she has spent time since the 1990s, first as a summer tourist, then as a renter, and finally as a home owner. Her essays re-create for us her home on Deer Isle, the home away from the area of her birth, and in doing so she hones her skills in the area of essay and memoir, not surprisingly enhancing them by her poetic sensibilities.

        Her essays show the curiosity, and later the appreciation, she has for the people of Deer Isle, the natives and various newcomers like herself. But her true love are her natural neighbors, the ospreys that nest in a large precariously constructed nest on Heart Island, a very small island that is part of her view; the juncos in her oaks; and the five spruces she loses. She loves the barnacles, limpets, periwinkles, sea stars and brittle stars of low tide, green crabs in the rockweed, the wrack line, a mink, otters, the floating rafts of black eiders, and the distant Camden hills across the water. The attention she gives to all the aspects of the natural history of the island, and especially her love and appreciation of rocks, make this book special and memorable.

        The book is divided into two sections, Here and Away. Here always focuses on Deer Isle and its natural habitats—birds, barnacles, and trees—but also on making Here, this island, her home away from home. The section Away deals with some of her life separate from this island–as when she left for the Midwest during the winter or when she reaches inward to find what home meant to her as a child. But Away turns right back into Here, focusing strongly on the summer home as the true home in time and place and having to think about the Away section more philosophically or psychologically.

        In our last print issue, Under the Sun published Cummins’ essay, “Names: Remaking the Calendar.” The following year it was listed as Notable in Best American Essays. “Names,” now part of Cummins’ book, explores the significance of naming when she discovers that her road sign has been stolen and she has become “Woman Who Lives on Lane with No Name” (58). She experiences that learning the names of her new home–of lanes, of ebb and flood, of birds and trees, of people dead and alive, of who is “From Away” or “Local”–is more than mere knowledge. Instead, it is a “difference in seeing” (58).