Citing a line from Elizabeth
Bishop-"The bight is littered with old correspondences"-Scott Cairns avers:
"So, also, is my mind." Indeed,
it was Bishop's "The Bight"-encountered late in his undergraduate
education-that may have first alerted Cairns to one, key, salutary fact of
literary history: virtually every work written over the centuries has been to
some degree a responsive text, something of an epistolary response to what the
writer beholds-the landscape, the heavens, or-as in most cases-another prior
text.
In
addition to volumes by Coleridge, Keats, Bishop, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and
Auden, Cairns keeps collections by his beloved Greeks-Kavafy, Elytis, and
Seferis-on his writing desk. In corresponding with them, he engages some of the
profound and recurring themes of his distinguished career: the mystery of
creation (and its absent/present Creator), the sense that every word-every
term-proves to be less a terminus than a point of departure, and a vision of
inexhaustible Love transcending all apparent limits, all neat binaries,
including that of heaven and hell. These poets have served as his mentors, his
provocateurs, and-in his mind at least-his primary audience.
Correspondence
with My Greeks is a work at once deeply human and
hauntingly transcendent, the full flowering of the poet's lifelong devotion to
the generative power of the word.
