"The title of this new collection from J. David Cummings suggests a forensic investigation, or perhaps an archeological dig - and both are apt metaphors for these poems, which indeed do probe into mysteries and unearth the past, in this case the poet's very personal and sometimes painful past. Not incidentally, Cummings is a theoretical physicist by training, a field devoted to elucidating hidden order out of the ineffable, and that background serves him well as he applies the instrumentalities of poetry to the dark matter of the heart. Likewise, the title of his long central poem "Praise Dust" suggests both the "star stuff" out of which we are composed - "the ceaseless anarchy of the small invisible" - and the final destiny of all flesh. "Praise equation / and number, poem and song" he proclaims, and if this seems an odd juxtaposition of head and heart, it isn't really - for like physics, poetry deals in both precision and abstraction. Cummings wields his verse like a finely calibrated tool, delicately peeling back layers of memory to expose meaning. Near the end of this intensely personal process he finds his "self / Still the flickering illusion, the question mark," encompassed by "the loud silence" of being - not an ominous silence, but "the quiet inside a poem, when words / Align in the innocence, when an old hand gathers." What Cummings has gathered here, the bones of truth that he has handled, reveal a common humanity - how the story of every one life enlightens everyone's life"--