The Gospel according to Wild Indigo

by Cyrus Cassells

Finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize, 2018
Finalist for the Helen C. Smith Award for the Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2019
Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature in Poetry, 2019

Consisting of two dynamic song cycles, Cyrus Cassells’s sixth poetry volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo , keeps the reader on edge with a timeless and beguiling feast of language that fuses together history, memory, and family.
 
The first cycle, rooted in the culture of the Gullah people of Charleston and the Sea Islands, celebrates the resilience of the rice- and indigo-working slaves and their descendants who have forged a unique Africa-inspired language and culture. Set against a Mediterranean backdrop, the second cycle explores themes of pilgrimage, love, and loss, concluding with a pair of elegies to the poet’s mother and the many men lost in the juggernaut of the AIDS crisis. Throughout, Cassells invites the reader to consider the duality of grief and love, as well as the shifting connections between past and present.
 
Cassells’s language is always striking, unpredictable, and beautiful, conjuring a world not only of “placid seagulls perched / in priest-gentle pines / like festive Christmas ornaments” but also one where “Death prevailed, / tireless as a forest partisan.” His poems transport the reader across time, space, and language, searching constantly not just for empathy but also for the human spirit in its triumph, for “our human joy, / laced with an ageless grieving.”
 

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published February 22, 2018

Reviews

[Brandon Beck PhD]

Since his first book, The Mud Actor, Cassells continues to delight. This latest collection of original poems is yet another sensual, visceral encounter for the senses and emotions.

[Dom Zuccone]

Cyrus Cassells has since Soul Make a Path Through Shouting been one of America’s most operatic lyric poets. In his ensuing work he evoked both a spiritual and political consciousness that eschewed obvious judgment or appropriated voice to bring forward a panoply of voices simultaneously intimate and apart from their subject. His maturity as a poet in The Gospel According to Wild Indigo is clear from the deft indirection the title poem develops into a crepuscular oratorio. In the second half of this Gospel, Lovers Borrowing the Language of Cicadas, the writer presents the voices one might overhear in transit or in conversation at a timeless café table. They are transformed into wondrous half-arguments with loss…a conversation with the mother of the Italian poet, Bertolucci, a scattered bouquet of late returns, a re-interpretation of the death of Van Gogh, a mystic visit to Lorca’s final geography, misassumptions and recollections. Mr. Cassells, as ever, writes for intelligent readers with sophisticated cultural knowledge. The restraint and subtlety shown throughout this volume, are qualities an artist only develops by a life of defining taste and parsing experience. This is a volume of reticent polemics and wrought understatement, an admirable aspiration too often lost in the raucous vernacular of our times.

[Tim Griffiths]

Love his style. Wonderful descriptions. A master of adjectives. Lovely.