Lacunae: New Poems - Paperback

by Scott Cairns (Author)

New poetry from Scott Cairns on containing the uncontainable

Often, when speaking of what he has called the poetic operation of language, Scott Cairns has characterized that event as our "glimpsing an indeterminate, inexhaustible enormity within a discrete space." This is the poet's continuing fascination with lacunae, those spaces, those openings that offer more within than appearances can register from outside the ostensible covert of their terms. Cairns is here focused upon how an image, a word, or--in the case of the Theotokos--a womb can contain the uncontainable. As Orthodox hymnography avers, she is more spacious than the heavens. So, too, the poet suggests, in its own, modest way, the poem might give birth to more, and more, and yet more than even the poet supposes.

Author Biography

Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of nine poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.