What makes words arranged on a page serve as a poem? Over the centuries, poets and critics have spoken of poetry as prospective (as opposed to retrospective), as generating openness, suggestiveness, connotative implication, ambiguity, and-as poet Scott Cairns has said-recognizing the poem as a scene of meaning-making, rather than merely a document of meaning made.
In each of these attempts to name the poetic operation of language, one common disposition obtains: a genuine poem is never finished in its effort to lead a reader into further meaning-making. One might say that the poem is a place-a semantic field-where a recombination of old things can give rise to a new thing.
The poems offered in Against Certainty have been crafted to open up possibilities not only for the reader, but also for the poet himself. As Cairns notes, both the form and the substance of these poems are "the results of my writing to see what I didn't know to see, to say what I didn't know to say." A poem invites the reader to come to terms in order to appreciate them as the approachable terminus of new departure.
Against Certainty is the culmination of forty years of literary pilgrimage, resounding evidence that Scott Cairns has produced not only a richly layered body of work but also a poetics that restores the craft to its ancient, enduring purpose.
About the Author :
Scott Cairns is Curators' Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poetry and essays have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. His recent books include Correspondence with My Greeks, Lacunae, Anaphora, Slow Pilgrim, and Idiot Psalms. He is the author of a spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, and a book-length essay, The End of Suffering. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014. He lives in Bellingham, Washington.
Review :
In these both grave and buoyant poems, Scott Cairns proves himself not only a master of the sublime but one of the most moving and capacious poets writing today. In poems variously set in Greece and Venice; in honor of Auden, Neruda and Eliot; paeans to dogs and saints; his occasions and meditations give us experiences in which we, along with Cairns, glimpse the expanse of God and live the moments of a provisionally stilled soul. This is a beautiful collection.
-Susan Wheeler, author of Assorted Poems, National Book Award finalist
Scott Cairns's Against Certainty testifies to the power of faith and the power of poetry. These poems are brilliant, witty, philosophical, deep, inspiring, serious, and self-effacing. Cairns is against certainty in the sense that his faith is a daily struggle in response to his own painfully honest doubts. "The mystic makes his way most modestly," he writes, and his modest approach brings lofty truths down to earth, as he confesses himself "ambivalent regarding any / expectation" from prayer, "of much beyond the sweet / balm that saying the Name involves."
-Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems, 1976-2022
At the threshold, valedictory, sublime, Scott Cairns's Against Certainty is a book of consolation from and confrontation with the God who is "surely our end / which makes our end an endless one . . . and we in Him continue . . . endlessly more like Him." Like his spiritual and poetic forebears Herbert and Donne, Hopkins and Dickinson, Cairns stares deeply and compassionately into that defeated darkness. He calls us with him into-and out of-the holy and beloved things of the world and into the holier ones that await.
-Bruce Beasley, author of Prayershreds
