Poets: History’s Conversation Carriers
A Feature Review of
Correspondence with My Greeks
Scott Cairns
Paperback: Slant Books, 2024
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]
Reviewed by Tommy Welty
There is a truism that all poetry is in conversation with all poetry. Fixed forms were fixed by poets talking and responding to one another. Every sonnet picks up where Petrarch, Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, and so on left off. Scott Cairns’s poems in his new collection, Correspondence with My Greeks, continue a conversation in attempts to translate poems by his favorite Greek poets. In the collection’s introduction, Cairns explains that these poets’ works, “further nudged me out of my own, clipped existence, my previous habits of composition, and pushed me into another dynamic altogether” (xii). He comments on the translation process in an early poem, Matter of Translation (14-15), by considering the differences between lines he translated by Zoe Karelli and a translation by Kimon Friar. He writes in the first stanza: “Of what Zoe Karelli wrote / I dare to shape the following:” For Cairns, continuing the conversation is an act of courage and daring. Regarding both translations he writes:
I miss
the subtle gesture our Zoe
has shaped suggesting it is love
proves agent of the shaper’s breath,
while all the while the willing
artificer but bears witness
to love’s inspiring agency.
It is love, Cairns suggests, that empowers the poem. Any further translation or engagement with poetry is a witness to love’s ongoing inspiration.
Each poem in the collection is addressed with an epigraph to one of the poets who Cairns is in conversation with while also addressing the reader. The poet sees himself speaking into a “conversation that both preceded me and will survive me” (xii). As much as Correspondence with My Greeks is a response it is also the next thought in an ongoing dialogue. These poems are an invitation. In the poem Inclination (78), Cairns writes:
I pray that my poems, also,
become ridden with erasure,
and that those lacunae prove
provocation for a visit.
We, the readers, are welcomed into love – the love Karelli shapes her poems with and the love Cairns shares for his Greeks. All are invited. In the poem Litany For Those Omitted (44) the poet prays for those whose lives have been cut short, for the isolated young and old, those who have suffered and have only had that suffering increased by others, the fearful. Echoing the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:22, Cairns extends the invitation and prayer to all of groaning creation:
For the luminous expanse of flora and fauna suffering
from expedience and greed affected by a dimming anthropos.
For our glorious kosmos, keening in despair.
In a thesis of sorts, the 23 lines of They Open Us (19) elucidates the power of love within poetry. In an extended, three-clause sentence we see how poetry “like the Gospel / opens us to waves of unexpected dangers” and
woos meandering millions yet to notice
the brother or sister teetering on the cliff,
compelling that we reach out a hand.
Loveshaped poetry can open us from self-centeredness to one another. In Correspondence With my Greeks, poetry is an occasion of connection – transnatural, transcultural connection; between mothers and fathers, children born and children miscarried; for the wounded, the omitted, and the “numbskulls and dipshits” (3) who have made a circus of our body politic.
I had the immense pleasure of meeting Cairns briefly at the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids in April, 2024. In our conversation, Scott – if I can be so bold – was funny, charming, warm. He spoke with a compassionate conviction on behalf of his students. This collection matches the same wit, humor, and compassion the poet showed in our conversation and his previous works. I laughed out loud at the poem The Democratic State (3) in the weeks leading up to the 2024 presidential election. I returned to it after for comfort. Without giving in to cynicism, Correspondence with My Greeks sees this moment, and all moments like it, with great clarity. In the poem Vantage (53),Cairns gives voice to the anxious questions these moment raise,
My times? My era? My discrete
vantage point here at the narrowing
tip of history? What can I say? What
can I make of it?
And yet there is a hope offered. In these times and eras, when our hands are clenched in fists of fear, poetry can have the effect of wooing us to notice and reach out to one another. The conversation is not so grim. In the closing couplets of a Late Prayer (62):
Even if our history is troubled,
and the near term appears to be also troubled,
promise me that these concerns will remain
ineffectual in spoiling the joy of rising
from your bed, opening the door, stepping out.
Though the world “appears wretched, choked by a broken, / angry, and willfully cruel people” (Orthodoxy, 36) we might wonder how it is possible to carry “at least some distance into the world / this fragrance, this sweetness, these images?” (36) And, yet, carry on we must. The conversation has not ended. These poems, or any poem that has spoken to us, or any poem we might share with others gives voice to each delight and each despair. And we– as Cairns concludes in They Open Us– “we raise our heads, and do not shirk, obliged to sing.”
Tommy Welty
Tommy Welty is a pastor and poet in Southern California where he lives with his wife and children. His writing has appeared in Ekstasis, Solum Literary Press, Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere.
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
