Overview

"Citing a line from Elizabeth Bishop-""The bight is littered with old correspondences""-Scott Cairns avers: ""So, also, is my mind."" Indeed, it was Bishop's ""The Bight""-encountered late in his undergraduate education-that may have first alerted Cairns to one, key, salutary fact of literary history: virtually every work written over the centuries has been to some degree a responsive text, something of an epistolary response to what the writer beholds-the landscape, the heavens, or-as in most cases-another prior text. In addition to volumes by Coleridge, Keats, Bishop, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Auden, Cairns keeps collections by his beloved Greeks-Kavafy, Elytis, and Seferis-on his writing desk. In corresponding with them, he engages some of the profound and recurring themes of his distinguished career: the mystery of creation (and its absent/present Creator), the sense that every word-every term-proves to be less a terminus than a point of departure, and a vision of inexhaustible Love transcending all apparent limits, all neat binaries, including that of heaven and hell. These poets have served as his mentors, his provocateurs, and-in his mind at least-his primary audience. Correspondence with My Greeks is a work at once deeply human and hauntingly transcendent, the full flowering of the poet's lifelong devotion to the generative power of the word."

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9781639821723

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Reviews

"I've been reading-and relying on-Scott Cairns's poems for thirty years. He is one of those rare poets in whose work you feel a whole life underlying and fortifying every utterance. His work has reached far beyond the poetry world into the lives of readers who know poetry can be a source not only of delight and wisdom, but of survival. -Christian Wiman, author of Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair As Scott Cairns demonstrates in this characteristically wry yet weighty new collection, language begets language, casting itself urgently into the past and future at once, seeking-and finding-the divine. As it speaks back through his own life and a century of Greek poetry, Cairns's language finds and deploys faith, paradox, low and high discourse, an ""elegance"" he attributes to Kavafy but makes, as a true poet will, his own. -Katharine Coles, author of The Stranger I Become This superb, highly personal book is the work of a mature writer who hopes his poems are a constant prayer to be awake as the Lord approaches; and who understands that his life (and all our lives) ""appear as a confusion / of compassions and judgments, kindnesses / and cruelties, consolations and regrets"" as we make our way among the mysteries of being here. -Robert Cording, author of In the Unwalled City These poems-or palimpsests-take shape where ""our lost beloveds gather / along the far bank murmuring."" The distinctive Scott Cairns manner abides-subtle undulations of syntax mapping a topography of belief-while these poems extol what is found in translation, in writing as an outcome of joyful reading. -Christopher Bakken, author of Eternity & Oranges"

Author Information

Scott Cairns is Curators' Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at University of Missouri. He directs the low-residency MFA Program at Seattle Pacific University. His poetry and essays have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. His recent books include Lacunae, Anaphora, Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems, and Idiot Psalms. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.

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