Correspondence with My Greeks

            Indeed,it was Bishop’s “The Bight”—encountered late in his undergraduateeducation—that may have first alerted Cairns to one, key, salutary fact ofliterary history: virtually every work written over the centuries has been tosome degree a responsive text, something of an epistolary response to what thewriter beholds—the landscape, the heavens, or—as in most cases—another priortext.

            Inaddition to volumes by Coleridge, Keats, Bishop, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, andAuden, Cairns keeps collections by his beloved Greeks—Kavafy, Elytis, andSeferis—on his writing desk. In corresponding with them, he engages some of theprofound and recurring themes of his distinguished career: the mystery ofcreation (and its absent/present Creator), the sense that every word—everyterm—proves to be less a terminus than a point of departure, and a vision ofinexhaustible Love transcending all apparent limits, all neat binaries,including that of heaven and hell. These poets have served as his mentors, hisprovocateurs, and—in his mind at least—his primary audience.

            Correspondencewith My Greeks is a work at once deeply human andhauntingly transcendent, the full flowering of the poet’s lifelong devotion tothe generative power of the word.