Recovered Body [Paperback]

Scott Cairns (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1998

The fourth collection of poems by Scott Cairns, Recovered Body, employs disarming language as it revises and gives new life to a wide range of familiar stories. Here, we overhear some of Wallace Stevens's late ruminations, we witness an erotic frolicking between poet and muse, and we receive an epistle on the subjects of love and the body from Mary Magdalen. The poet's richly cadenced style of storytelling offers theological poetry that leaves even the most cynical of readers nodding and grinning.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Cairns (Figures of the Ghost, Univ. of Georgia, 1994) is a religious poet, a spiritual poet, but most importantly a serious poet. He is not given to rehashing scripture or invoking prayer?he does both, in his own way, but in service to a greater goal. These poems seek not answers but understanding and an appreciation of life's complexities; the result is not so much a poetry of testimony as of investigation. Cairns reconsiders the biblical narratives that define his being in works like "The Death of Moses," "The Sacrifice of Isaac," "Jonah's Imprisonment," and "The Turning of Lot's Wife." In the latter poem, Marah is "unlike her husband" and remains faithful: "For even as the man fled the horrors of a city's conflagration...Marah saw that she could not turn her back on even one doomed child of the city, but must turn her back instead on the saved." Recommended.?Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Scott Cairns has the imaginative power and verbal grace to resurrect a deadened world-relocating the sacred in the body where it belongs. -- Eleanor Wilner

Scott Cairns is one of the best poets alive. -- Annie Dillard

Writing in fervor-not piety-as a poet writes in verse-not doggerel-Cairns brings to mind Nietzche's remark that we have Art that we may not perish from Truth. Cairns has Religion that he may not perish from Poetry. -- Richard Howard

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Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: George Braziller Inc; 1st edition (August 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807614378
• ISBN-13: 978-0807614372
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,858,981 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow! Mystery gets a Body!, May 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Recovered Body (Paperback)

Erotic, holy, erudite, and deeply moving! I love how Cairns engages both metaphysical mystery and sensual materiality in a single amazing moment, in a single turn of phrase--as in "Loves" when Magdalen observes "All loves are bodily, require that the lips part, and press their trace of secrecy upon the one beloved." I'd say the visionary has returned to American poetry.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Troubling revisions of Christian myth, August 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Recovered Body (Paperback)

I'm no convert, but I must say the charm and candor of these poems (not to mention the music and craft of the poems themselves) have me rethinking some of my knee-jerk dismissal of that old story. I'd heard he was a CHRISTIAN poet, but I didn't know he was also a POET. Amazing work.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite, October 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Recovered Body (Paperback)

Cairns' best work yet. Personal highlights from the collection: "Interval with Erato" "The Estuary" "Short Trip to the Edge." Sweet, special work.