Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (review)

Scott Cairns's new and selected gives us roughly twenty years of poetry by perhaps the most important and promising religious poet of his generation. The title word philokalia means "love of the good/the beautiful," with the sense that both roots are inseparable. The early poems of the Cairns ouvre are smallish, but masterful in establishing a tone of voice; the later poems are more overtly grand in theme, more formal, and enlarge to a voice that is fully realized and thus believable. Emphasizing in Cairns the moral choice that makes human experience meaningful, the poet and critic Jonathan Holden has written in The Fate of American Poetry (1991) that Cairns "owes a great deal to the Christian existentialist writing of Kierkegard...." A practicing Eastern Orthodox Christian, Scott Cairns was raised Southern Baptist. This alone says very little about what a new reader can expect from his work; his poems have grown from an early plain style to an overt exegesis of the language of religious understanding, so Cairns's readers anticipate a large development in the poet's language. In American poetry, the religious thread has sometimes been weak, sometimes invisible; in Cairns that thread has always been a major pattern. Yet it is, blessedly so, a sense of humor that takes us into so many of his poems.

In his first book, The Theology of Doubt (Cleveland State University Press, 1985), Scott Cairns manages large themes in the characteristic ease of an unencumbered free verse. In one poem, having just been spoken to of kindness and love, we are warned against moral ambition: "Just don't go thinking/you deserve any of it" ("Imperative"). This statement is a signature remark of his inquiries into belief and human weakness. These lovely and easy poems still seem remarkable even against the intervention of three other books (not including this one), The Translation of Babel (University of Georgia, 1990), Figures for the Ghost (University of Georgia, 1994), and, more recently, Recovered Body (George Braziller, 1998). Each new book makes progress in mastering an ironic, humorous, and conversational voice against the unwieldy subjects of history, Biblical history, and personal belief. In a time of chiliastic decadence where the religious antidote is too often the glib advertisement of political witnessing, the poems of Cairns are otherwise inclined. By way of ordinary speech and a resonant diction, the poet renders language as a sophisticated and singular conversation about evil and religious belief.

Still, it is hard to guess from that first book the accomplishment and the surprise of such poems as "Embalming," from Babel, where the poet begins, it seems, the project of Recovered Body: "Hold the knife as you would a quill, hardly at all./See the first line before you cross it, and draw"; or "Still Waiting," positioned as wry homage to the Poet of the City and therefore as a renewal: "Yes, and after all of this we stand, still waiting/for those quaint people to arrive/ And isn't it just like/barbarians to make us wait...."; and from his Figures such a poem as his retelling in "The Turning of Lot's Wife": "First of all, she had a name...." Cairns is not a poet who affects the occasional trope of religious experience; as his first poems promise and as his later poems show, a refinement of his poetic voice cannot be divided from his own religious understanding.

The opening poem of Recovered Body ("Necropolitan") begins, "Not your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze/of those skeletal figures affects/the disposition of the grinning candies/ one finds in Mexico..." Here a just dead body sugars into a "confection" as it becomes a "citizen of a less earnest electorate." The writing is something terrifically original here, beginning, as so often with Cairns, with a humorous and conversational tone of voice (Horation it seems to me). That voice accrues a seriousness through steadily-built-upon layers of metaphor and a sense of [End Page 193...