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Beautiful Signor
A trenchant search for beauty amidst a world ravaged by cruelty.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 19, 2022
Cyrus Cassells is a poet of exuberance and wildly inventive vocabulary. Having read his wonderful "Down from the Houses of Magic" in the Black Nature anthology, picking up Beautiful Signor when I ran into it at the library was a natural thing for me. The poems in Beautiful Signor make up one, shall we say, cycle, with their outlandish diction complemented by a very straightforward message: they're love poems, and some of the most peak-emotion-expressing ones I've ever encountered.
The copy on the back of the book states that Cassells' poems "echo... the ecstasies expressed by the Sufi poets about 'The Beloved'", begging a comparison to Gregory Orr's Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved, which I read earlier this year, and which seems to be an attempt on Orr's part to recreate the Sufis' message while being religiously agnostic. But Cassells seems to be far more specific in his invocation of his "beautiful Signor": "... you tell me / as pubescent boys / you clung together / in a bed of coats, / after your brother drowned; / in your aunt's baronial armoire / he licked your palms / and covered your belly with blossoms / he found in a park —" (from "Love Poem of the Cretan Spring"). Even as the love they experience touches on the undifferentiated universal, then, it seems that Cassells always has a specific Beloved in mind.
Another book that came to my mind while reading Beautiful Signor was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, in terms of the respective authors' expressions of absolute devotion (almost in the sense even of worship) to the objects of their love. But on the whole, I preferred Cassells' book to Barrett Browning's. In Beautiful Signor, Cassells absolutely does not belittle himself in comparison to his beloved. Indeed, he makes shockingly few statements about himself, or rather his persona, in Beautiful Signor. Instead, the personality this persona displays about itself generally expresses itself entirely within Cassells' firecrackers of language.
I believe there is much contemporary poetry I don't connect to (this book is actually 25 years old, but Cassells is still writing), and the things I find to be a draw in Beautiful Signor, such as its proliferation of fanciful adjectives, others might find to be a drawback. But, compared to much poetry whose métier is slowness and retrospection, I find this book, with its focus so much on language and the ecstasy of the present moment, a real breath of fresh air.
The copy on the back of the book states that Cassells' poems "echo... the ecstasies expressed by the Sufi poets about 'The Beloved'", begging a comparison to Gregory Orr's Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved, which I read earlier this year, and which seems to be an attempt on Orr's part to recreate the Sufis' message while being religiously agnostic. But Cassells seems to be far more specific in his invocation of his "beautiful Signor": "... you tell me / as pubescent boys / you clung together / in a bed of coats, / after your brother drowned; / in your aunt's baronial armoire / he licked your palms / and covered your belly with blossoms / he found in a park —" (from "Love Poem of the Cretan Spring"). Even as the love they experience touches on the undifferentiated universal, then, it seems that Cassells always has a specific Beloved in mind.
Another book that came to my mind while reading Beautiful Signor was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, in terms of the respective authors' expressions of absolute devotion (almost in the sense even of worship) to the objects of their love. But on the whole, I preferred Cassells' book to Barrett Browning's. In Beautiful Signor, Cassells absolutely does not belittle himself in comparison to his beloved. Indeed, he makes shockingly few statements about himself, or rather his persona, in Beautiful Signor. Instead, the personality this persona displays about itself generally expresses itself entirely within Cassells' firecrackers of language.
I believe there is much contemporary poetry I don't connect to (this book is actually 25 years old, but Cassells is still writing), and the things I find to be a draw in Beautiful Signor, such as its proliferation of fanciful adjectives, others might find to be a drawback. But, compared to much poetry whose métier is slowness and retrospection, I find this book, with its focus so much on language and the ecstasy of the present moment, a real breath of fresh air.
June 11, 2024
3 3/4 stars
May 13, 2008
Gorgeous poetry. I love it.
July 1, 2012
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award
winner of the Sister Circle Book Award
Finalist for the Bay Area Book Critics Award
winner of the Sister Circle Book Award
Finalist for the Bay Area Book Critics Award
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews