Compass of Affection: New and Selected Poems [Hardcover]

Scott Cairns (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 148 pages
• Publisher: Paraclete Press (MA) (September 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557255032
• ISBN-13: 978-1557255037
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #285,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #88 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Literature & Fiction > Poetry

More About the Author

Scott Cairns is the author of six collections of poetry, The Theology of Doubt, The Translation of Babel, Figures for the Ghost, Recovered Body, Philokalia, and most recently Compass of Affection: Poems New & Selected. With W. Scott Olsen, he co-edited The Sacred Place, a collection of prose and verse celebrating the intersections of landscape and ideas of the holy. He wrote the libretto for The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, an oratorio composed by JAC Redford. His poetry and essays have been included in Best Spiritual Writing, Best American Spiritual Writing, The Pushcart Prize XXVI, Upholding Mystery (Oxford, 1997), The Best of Prairie Schooner, and Shadow & Light, among other anthologies. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, The New Republic, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Spiritus, Tiferet, Western Humanities Review, and many other journals. He has taught American literature, poetry writing, and poetics courses at Westminster College, University of North Texas, Old Dominion University, and at University of Missouri, where he is currently Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing. In 1993, he founded the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry; he served as its series editor from 1993 through 2006. In 2007, his spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, was published by HarperSanFrancisco and his translations and adaptations, Love's Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life, was published by Paraclete Press. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and was named the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in English at the University of Missouri in 2009.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Theology of Poetry, November 1, 2010

By 

Glynn Young - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Compass of Affection: New and Selected Poems (Hardcover)

I've never read a theology of poetry before, but I have now with "Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected" by Scott Cairns.

Published in 2006, this volume of poems includes several selected from previously published works from 1985 to 2002, and then new poems published in 2006. Together, they constitute a kind of "theology of poetry," or perhaps a poetry of theology.

Cairns, professor of English at the University of Missouri, employs poetry to study the teachings of the Bible, the role of tradition, and the life of faith. It is a quiet volume, quiet but full of important things.

It's not the first poem selected, but "The Beginning of the World" is a kind of commentary and explication of the Book of Genesis. From that poem, first published in Figures for the Ghost in 1994:

"But even before that original issue, first utterance of our Great
solitary, His self-demarcation of Himself, before even that first birth
I suspect an inclination. In God's center, something of a murmur,
pre-verbal, pre-phenomenal, perhaps nothing more disturbing to the
moment than a silent clearing of the hollowed throat, am approach
merely, but it was a beginning earlier than the one we had supposed,
and a willingness for something standing our apart from Him, if
nonetheless His own."

"Blessed," published in the volume Philokalia in 2002, is a kind of commentary on the beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew:

"By their very designations, we know the meek
are available for all manner of insult,
the poor have no effectual recourse against
the blithe designs of the rich, and that enigmatic
crew we recognize as merciful still refuses
to stand up for itself, which makes all of them prime
objects for whatever device the brutes ordain..."

Many of the poems are about the idea of life and faith as pilgrimage, yet it is not the idea that "the journey is the point" but more than faith itself is a pilgrimage, often an interior pilgrimage, the growing awareness of God. From "Against Justice" (2006):

"Yes, I know the poem is difficult, but far more likely to be read
than any script the habits score. The chore, as I've suggested,
lies in tracing any solid thread between the outcome
and its cause, any lead, or leading proposition posed
so as to offer what pass for revelation. The God
is hardly just, and we are grateful for His oversight."

"Compass of Affection" is a richly splendid introduction to Scott Cairns' poetry and his faith, as well as to the idea of faith itself.