Figures for the Ghost: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Scott Cairns (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This book of poems is a quiet, thoughtful excavation of the past. The voice of Cairns ( The Translation of Babel ) is conversational and coaxing--confiding in us secrets that seem to be our own. In "The Turning of Lot's Wife," one of the numerous poems in which Cairns adroitly recasts Biblical characters and themes, Lot's wife "saw that she could / not turn her back on even one doomed child of the city, but / must turn her back instead upon the saved." Comfortably weaving between his own personal past, classical myth and Christian theology, Cairns shows a disarming ability to gain the reader's ear with a murmuring tone. Listening, we hear a speaker of wry directness. For example, in "The History of My Late Progress," Cairns describes his own brush with a heart attack: " I thought I was a goner . / Not really. / No one, I guess, ever really thinks that. / The closest we come is this uncanny, / dispassionate sitting-back, just watching / to see how we'll be saved." At times, his lines lose their tightness and fall toward prose. But Figures for the Ghost is the work of a writer who seems to have spent a long time listening before reporting what he has heard.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Advent
And Also From The Son
The Beginning Of The World
City Under Construction
Dead Sea Bathers
The Death Of Penelope
Disciplinarian Treatises: 10. A Recuperation Of Sin
Disciplinarian Treatises: 11. Pain
Disciplinarian Treatises: 12. End Of Heaven And End Of Hell
Disciplinary Treatises: 1. On The Holy Spirit
Disciplinary Treatises: 2. The Embarrassment Of Last Things
Disciplinary Treatises: 3. Sacraments
Disciplinary Treatises: 4. The Communion Of The Body
Disciplinary Treatises: 5. Angels
Disciplinary Treatises: 6. Satan
Disciplinary Treatises: 7. Baptism
Disciplinary Treatises: 8. Blood Atonement
Disciplinary Treatises: 9. Grace
The Glass Man
Herod
The History Of My Late Progress
The Holy Ghost
Inscription
Late Epistle
The Lie Of The Future
Mortuary Art
Murmur
Prospect Of The Interior
Return Directive
Serenade
The Turning Of Lot's Wife
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr (June 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820316016
• ISBN-13: 978-0820316017
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,249,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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.