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Synopsis
In this provocative collection, rich with expression and dense with meaning, Scott Cairns expresses an immediate, incarnate theology of God’s power and presence in the world. Spanning thirty years and including selections from four of his previous collections, Compass of Affection illuminates the poet’s longstanding engagement with language as revelation, and with poetry as way of discovery. For those who already admire the poetry of Scott Cairns and for those who have yet to be introduced, this essential volume presents the best of his work – the holy made tangible, love made flesh, and theology performed rather than discussed.Praise for Scott Cairns’ work
“Scott Cairns [is] perhaps the most important and promising religious poet of his generation.” —Prairie Schooner
“The voice of Cairns is conversational and coaxing—confiding in us secrets that seem to be our own.” —Publishers Weekly
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About the Author
Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of ten poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.
Reviews
Cairns's warm, calm, personal tones win him respect in many quarters, but his core audience comes from his subject matter: the mysteries, consolations and consequences of Christian belief. Questions about how to live as a Christian, how to understand such theological concepts as eros and agape, as sacrifice and resurrection, give depth and seriousness to his verse. Familiarity not only with New Testament texts but with the Church Fathers, their methods of exegesis and sometimes parallel questions from Jewish learning give Cairns a range of allusion and launching pads for his poems, as in the winning series "Adventures in New Testament Greek." A poem from his first collection, The Theology of Doubt (1985), explores "the sober forms / of worship, the forms love takes// when the mind is rested"; "Late Apocalypse," one of the 27 new poems, begins, "Blessed is anyone who reads much of anything, blessed / and most unusual." That poem, among his best, rises into a serious condemnation of our consumer-driven world. More often Cairns seeks compassionate ways to apply the lessons of theologians or of Christ to his own life; one does not need to be Christian, or even religious, to profit from what he finds. (Sept.)
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- PublisherParaclete Press
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 1557255032
- ISBN 13 9781557255037
- BindingHardcover
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages148
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Hardcover. Condition: New. If you could hear him read, you would understand. You see, the lilt of his voice, the natural pauses, sometimes expectant of your discernment of implied laughter, the gentle inflection upon just the right word-well, if you could hear them, then you would sense the real genius between these covers. But we only have words; which, according to Mr. Cairns, bear some weight: 'Repentance, you'll observe, / glibly bears the bent / of thought revisited, / and mind's familiar stamp / - a quaint, half-hearted / doubleness that couples / all compunction with a pledge / of recurrent screw-up. / The heart's metanoia, / on the other hand, turns / without regret, turns not / so much away, as toward, / as if the slow pilgrim / has been surprised to find / that sin is not so bad / as it is a waste of time.' Cairns' poems, in this selection from all his previous collections save Recovered Body, in addition to new ones never published, remind and inform us of the really important things: Death: 'The thing to remember is how / tentative all of this really is. / You could wake up dead.' And Life: 'What stillness their hearts must know; these bathers / laid out and glistening along the dissolve / of an ancient sea, / their bodies-so late from brief exercise; / so lately thrown down in exhaustion- / already marbled'. And triumph over Death: 'Everything we know as well as everything we don't in all / creation came to be in that brief, abysmal / vacuum The Holy One first opened in Himself. / So it's not so far a stretch from that Divine Excess / to advocate the sacred possibility / that in some final, graceful metanoia He / will mend that ancient wound completely, and for all.' 161 pp. Seller Inventory # 3530
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