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Recovered Body
The fourth collection of poems by Scott Cairns, Recovered Body, employs disarming language as it revises and gives new life to a wide range of familiar stories. Here, we overhear some of Wallace Stevens's late ruminations, we witness an erotic frolicking between poet and muse, and we receive an epistle on the subjects of love and the body from Mary Magdalen. The poet's richly cadenced style of storytelling offers theological poetry that leaves even the most cynical of readers nodding and grinning.
- GenresPoetry
74 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 18, 2011
I admired these poems more than I loved them. Though that may say more about me than about the poems. Believing with the Konstanz school that the work of art is an event occurring only when an object is encountered, reviewers should probably preface what they have to say with self-critique, admitting that, after all, every act of criticism is disguised autobiography, or at least disguised desire. (How else to account for the different ways a person takes a book in the course of a life—thrilled in youth and bemused or embarrassed in middle age that we took the time once to be enthused.) In that spirit I should say that I was tired when I read these poems, and more tired when I read through a second time. It also likely didn’t help matters that I had read through Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do” earlier this week, a collection that left me feeling shaken and undone, as if in counting her losses she had fingered the raw places left by mine. Finally, it may be that in the recesses of my brain I’m carrying the memory of Cairns visit to Messiah College several years ago, delivering a reading that I felt was both profound and down to earth, deeply serious while also good-humoured.
By comparison, these poems seemed to me this time around more accomplished than moving, as if written while attending more to other poems than to readers. This is not to say that there’s not a lot to admire or that there is not a great deal of accomplishment. Indeed, it a poet’s great advantage that if even half a dozen poems that strike the anvil, an entire collection will have been worth the reading. By comparison, fifty good pages in a novel otherwise full of dreck leave me infuriated that the promise in those pages had been such a tease. Cairns is at his best in taking the old, old stories and finding the new thing. His curiosity presses the “Why?” and “What if?” Why, after all, did Lot’s wife look back. Could it have been something like compassion? And, if we were truthful with ourselves, won’t we admit that we are, in the lurid eye of our imaginations, looking back too at smoldering Sodom? What if Jacob slew Isaac after all, the story of rams and angel a good tale to give God a little cover. Perhaps the most moving of these to me was his rendering of Joseph, long after the successes of his life and the moral triumphs of his forgiving spirit, never quite forgetting the terror of that adolescent grave he’d been assigned by his brothers:
“And in succeeding years, through their provocative turns of fortune—false accusations, a little stretch in prison, a developing facility with dreams—Joseph came gradually into his own, famously forgave his own, pretty much had the last laugh, save when, always as late in the day as he could manage, he gave in to sleep and to the return of that blue expanse, before which all accretion—accomplishment, embellishment, all likely interpretations—would drop away as he found himself again in the hollow of that well, naked, stunned, his every power spinning as he lay, and looked, and swam.”
This is old hat defamiliarization. But it is also really good stuff. How absolutely true it must be, or at least could have been, about Joseph. We want triumph without memory, and redemption without regrets. This and other poems like it tear Biblical and historical figures out of the thick mask of their necessary reputations, places where, as Cairns puts it in another poem, they are “all but veiled by chiaroscuro and the prominence.”
All of this is praise, and it may say something that I find myself admiring, and even liking, these poems the more I write about them in this review, writing, after all, an act of thought, an exercise of the imagination on the idea of poetry and literature and these poems and this literature. But in the reading I found all this just a little distancing, as if the manner of these poems was too far from my need. While the technology of the poetry was to make remote figures human for me again, to, as the title of the collection suggestion suggests, give testimony to the “recovered body,” the poems’ achievements seemed primarily intellectual or literary or interpretive, rather than visceral. Someone said they wanted poetry that made them feel as if the top of their heads had been taken off, and I tend to agree. But again, perhaps that only speaks to my own needs, my own place, my own embodiment, the facts of my father’s gradual descent in to dementia and my mother’s grappling with depression, that I miss and worry anxiously about my daughter away at school, or fret and feel tired already at the sense that the past summer never actually began and now it is all but ended. So perhaps it is not surprising that the poem I liked the most in the collection was also clearly the most lyric and personal. The one in which Cairns, remembering the death of his father, struck me as a person more than an imagination:
As we met around him
That last morning—none of us unaware
of what the morning would bring—I was struck
by how quickly he left us. And the room
emptied—comes to me now—far too quickly.
If impiety toward the dead were still
deemed sin, it was that morning our common
trespass, to have imagined too readily
his absence, to have all but denied him
as he lay, simply, present before us.
This poem--unlike the others, all occupying their own form of goodness--made me say Yes.
By comparison, these poems seemed to me this time around more accomplished than moving, as if written while attending more to other poems than to readers. This is not to say that there’s not a lot to admire or that there is not a great deal of accomplishment. Indeed, it a poet’s great advantage that if even half a dozen poems that strike the anvil, an entire collection will have been worth the reading. By comparison, fifty good pages in a novel otherwise full of dreck leave me infuriated that the promise in those pages had been such a tease. Cairns is at his best in taking the old, old stories and finding the new thing. His curiosity presses the “Why?” and “What if?” Why, after all, did Lot’s wife look back. Could it have been something like compassion? And, if we were truthful with ourselves, won’t we admit that we are, in the lurid eye of our imaginations, looking back too at smoldering Sodom? What if Jacob slew Isaac after all, the story of rams and angel a good tale to give God a little cover. Perhaps the most moving of these to me was his rendering of Joseph, long after the successes of his life and the moral triumphs of his forgiving spirit, never quite forgetting the terror of that adolescent grave he’d been assigned by his brothers:
“And in succeeding years, through their provocative turns of fortune—false accusations, a little stretch in prison, a developing facility with dreams—Joseph came gradually into his own, famously forgave his own, pretty much had the last laugh, save when, always as late in the day as he could manage, he gave in to sleep and to the return of that blue expanse, before which all accretion—accomplishment, embellishment, all likely interpretations—would drop away as he found himself again in the hollow of that well, naked, stunned, his every power spinning as he lay, and looked, and swam.”
This is old hat defamiliarization. But it is also really good stuff. How absolutely true it must be, or at least could have been, about Joseph. We want triumph without memory, and redemption without regrets. This and other poems like it tear Biblical and historical figures out of the thick mask of their necessary reputations, places where, as Cairns puts it in another poem, they are “all but veiled by chiaroscuro and the prominence.”
All of this is praise, and it may say something that I find myself admiring, and even liking, these poems the more I write about them in this review, writing, after all, an act of thought, an exercise of the imagination on the idea of poetry and literature and these poems and this literature. But in the reading I found all this just a little distancing, as if the manner of these poems was too far from my need. While the technology of the poetry was to make remote figures human for me again, to, as the title of the collection suggestion suggests, give testimony to the “recovered body,” the poems’ achievements seemed primarily intellectual or literary or interpretive, rather than visceral. Someone said they wanted poetry that made them feel as if the top of their heads had been taken off, and I tend to agree. But again, perhaps that only speaks to my own needs, my own place, my own embodiment, the facts of my father’s gradual descent in to dementia and my mother’s grappling with depression, that I miss and worry anxiously about my daughter away at school, or fret and feel tired already at the sense that the past summer never actually began and now it is all but ended. So perhaps it is not surprising that the poem I liked the most in the collection was also clearly the most lyric and personal. The one in which Cairns, remembering the death of his father, struck me as a person more than an imagination:
As we met around him
That last morning—none of us unaware
of what the morning would bring—I was struck
by how quickly he left us. And the room
emptied—comes to me now—far too quickly.
If impiety toward the dead were still
deemed sin, it was that morning our common
trespass, to have imagined too readily
his absence, to have all but denied him
as he lay, simply, present before us.
This poem--unlike the others, all occupying their own form of goodness--made me say Yes.
July 4, 2023
Picked this up at a used book sale for $2. Then I saw something on the back about theological poetry and was concerned. It was dense but not what I expected at all and enjoyed some of these.
July 17, 2012
I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert in poetry but I know what I like (and I like those dogs playing poker so you just get your mitts off that painting!).
Now, where was I?
Oh, yes. Poetry.
I don't insist that poetry rhyme, although I definitely prefer it if it does. Which puts Scott Cairns at a definite disadvantage since a lot of the poems in this book were prose sentences set in blocks. (You're right ... it DOES sound like paragraphs. But these were very, very short and blocky paragraphs. Artfully laid out paragraphs one might call them.)
They didn't rhyme. They didn't have a sense of rhythm as I read them aloud. In fact, I often didn't understand what those sentences meant, prose or not. And I have lots and lots of practice reading prose sentences. But some of these ... literally didn't make sense to either me or those I read them aloud to when hoping for enlightenment.
There were some that did make sense. Sadly, those most often seemed to be disagreeing with the Bible. Yes, I get it. Lovely that Lot's wife looked back because she was compassionate (oh ... "and maybe the ONLY compassionate person there?", you might ask). But compassion isn't the point of that story. Or rather, compassion IS actually the point of that story but that point is made with Abraham's and God's bartering session. Lot's wife may be as compassionate as she desires but she should do it without turning around. Or ... there's a new pillar of salt in the desert and we misplaced a wife somewhere.
Now, the good thing I can say about this book is that it made me much more open to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland when I discovered a blogger who is taking her readers through it bit by bit. And I am happy to say that from the very beginning I understood some of it (or what it meant to me) and found it thought provoking and hopeful, rather than incomprehensible and disdainful.
So there is a silver lining to this dark, grim cloud.
Now, where was I?
Oh, yes. Poetry.
I don't insist that poetry rhyme, although I definitely prefer it if it does. Which puts Scott Cairns at a definite disadvantage since a lot of the poems in this book were prose sentences set in blocks. (You're right ... it DOES sound like paragraphs. But these were very, very short and blocky paragraphs. Artfully laid out paragraphs one might call them.)
They didn't rhyme. They didn't have a sense of rhythm as I read them aloud. In fact, I often didn't understand what those sentences meant, prose or not. And I have lots and lots of practice reading prose sentences. But some of these ... literally didn't make sense to either me or those I read them aloud to when hoping for enlightenment.
There were some that did make sense. Sadly, those most often seemed to be disagreeing with the Bible. Yes, I get it. Lovely that Lot's wife looked back because she was compassionate (oh ... "and maybe the ONLY compassionate person there?", you might ask). But compassion isn't the point of that story. Or rather, compassion IS actually the point of that story but that point is made with Abraham's and God's bartering session. Lot's wife may be as compassionate as she desires but she should do it without turning around. Or ... there's a new pillar of salt in the desert and we misplaced a wife somewhere.
Now, the good thing I can say about this book is that it made me much more open to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland when I discovered a blogger who is taking her readers through it bit by bit. And I am happy to say that from the very beginning I understood some of it (or what it meant to me) and found it thought provoking and hopeful, rather than incomprehensible and disdainful.
So there is a silver lining to this dark, grim cloud.
Read
August 18, 2009Loaned to Brittny.
April 26, 2009
A beautiful book. I'm yet to find a book of poetry that explores the mystical power of language and the linguistic power of spirit more intelligently than this one.
Read
August 4, 2009I finally obtained this out of print book. I Mr. Cairns has bumped off Mr. Heaney as my favorite poet... see especially his psuedo-midrashes on Creation and Jonah.
October 9, 2014
Still my favorite collection from this poet- embodied and rich, the poems dig in deep.
February 28, 2015
I appreciate this much more the second time through, probably seven years later. Rich, embodied, and incarnational. I loved this collection.
March 14, 2011
One of those books that define everything you do after you read it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews