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Be Thou My Vision:
Witness to the Revelation

By Scott Cairns Essay

I WAS RAISED IN A FAMILY for whom our Baptist church was very much an extension of our home. While that church was—as I might now parse such matters—a particularly cranky Baptist church, it offered nonetheless a loving community to those within it. More importantly, that community offered me a first taste of what I…

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Tempest

By Scott Cairns Poetry

Paul Mazursky, director (1982) Kalibanos welcomes you to his comfy cave, and if the Sony Trinitron proves defective so too does the illusion that you had slipped free from the world and its ubiquitous corruptions, that you could simply say you would no longer play the soul-eroding role of mute, complicit slave. Many frames will…

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Sweet Life

By Scott Cairns Poetry

La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini (1960) In a frame or two, Marcello will turn away, finally having failed to hear her voice, the angelic girl beckoning from across the estuary’s rift in the beach, etching in the sand the divide between his world and her world. Behind him, in that flat expanse to which he…

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Which I is I?

By Luke Hankins Book Review

Three Poetry Collections Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns (Paraclete Press, 2014) Seam by Tarfia Faizullah (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013) F by Franz Wright (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)   IN THE LONG HISTORY of the poetry of religious devotion, one often encounters a guileless representation of the self in its attempts to relate to the divine. The…

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Nothing

By Scott Cairns Poetry

…no evil thing is evil insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is turned… —Saint Gregory Palamás What had I meant to say? Just now. I have forgotten. Which among the extant flourishing phenomena are you? Is that a limp? The evening drifts into its routine dimming of particulars, quite literally evening the scene…

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Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Scott Cairns

By Mary Kenagy Mitchell Interview

The current issue of Image features three new poems by Scott Cairns. The author of numerous volumes of poetry, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime contributor to Image, Scott has often advocated what he calls a “sacramental poetics”—the idea that a poem should not so much describe something as dosomething.   Image: Your poems use an exacting, prophetic voice, but…

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Another Idiot Psalm: We Say Flight

By Scott Cairns Poetry

We say flight of the imagination, but stand ankle-deep in silt. We say deep life of the mind, but seal the stone to keep the tomb untouched, O Stillness. Nearly all we find to say we speak for the most part unawares, what little bit we think to say unmoved, O Great Enormity Unmoved. Brief…

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Lenten Complaint

By Scott Cairns Poetry

The breakfast was adequate, the fast itself sub-par. We gluttons, having modified our habits only somewhat within the looming Lenten dark, failed quite to shake our thick despair, an air that clamped the heart, made moot the prayer. Wipe your chin. I’m dying here in Omaha, amid the flat, surrounded by the beefy, land-locked generations,…

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