“Uneasy Equations,” the final poem in Scott Cairns’s latest collection, begins, as so many of his poems do, in the middle of a conversation:

I, also, have begun to press each promising page for that elusive form, the likely

shape that might yet serve to at least suggest the rolling spaciousness one suspects

 

in most prágmata one happens upon—the sea, the shore, even the odd black shell

just now recovered during my morning snorkel. I, also, have lately hoped

 

to interrogate each apparent emptiness for an implicit fullness, each absence

for a presence. The form I’ve thus far found most compelling is that whose edges

 

seem most permeable.

Cairns, an Eastern Orthodox believer who lives in Tacoma but spends long stretches of each year in Greece, is a poet of permeability. In his new collection, Correspondence with My Greeks, a dizzying range of seeming oppositions—absence and presence, belief and unbelief, the apparent and the implicit, the past and the present, the eternal and the temporal, the poem and the world, the self and the other—become porous to one another. This isn’t achieved through vaporous lyricism. In poetry as in life, style is never just style. It’s an approach to existence, a way of holding the self that expresses what we value and what we don’t, and Cairns models and thus values lucidity in almost every line. (“I observe a startling / clarity in the night,” he writes in one poem. In another, he praises a “sudden / clarity [that] has led us finally to ask far / better questions.”) In his twelve collections of poetry, Cairns has pulled off something quite difficult, writing with precision about “all that vertiginous surround, each element / that draws from me as I draw from it, every / particular that bids me shape as I am shaped.”

In “Uneasy Equations,” we can see this vertiginous porousness at the level of form: how sounds from one word are picked up and transferred to another (the consonance in “press each promising page” and “The form I’ve thus far found”); how verb tense shifts effortlessly from present perfect (“have begun”) to conditional (“might yet serve”) to simple past (“just now recovered”); how, most tellingly, not just individual lines but entire stanzas are enjambed. I’m not sure that I’ve read a recent collection with more, and more interesting, enjambment than Correspondence with My Greeks—interesting because it’s the perfect formal embodiment of the collection’s broader thinking about poetry and permeability.

In an introduction to Correspondence with My Greeks, Cairns tells the reader that he begins his “mornings of writing by reading.” This fact—that he can only write by and through and after reading—leads to a description of his new collection’s genesis and to a more general account of how poetry gets written: “[V]irtually every work written over the centuries has been to some degree a responsive text, something of an epistolary response to what the writer beholds—the landscape, the heavens, or—as in most cases—another prior text.” In this way, poetry resembles correspondence: a mutual relationship in which text and reader answer and respond to one another. It also resembles grace. Poetry demands a response from us; it is a gift that offers, if we would accept it, a new kind of life.

The poems in Correspondence with My Greeks are deeply responsive, often opening as if in answer to someone or something else: “Yes. I have seen the end, and yes / I was disturbed by what I saw”; “I, too, have startled to see that I am / no longer that boy who so briefly bore / my name”; “Yes, the night proves heavy with dreams.” More specifically, Cairns’s poems arise from his reading of modern Greek poets: Constantine Cavafy, Yiorgos Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Zoë Karelli, among others. Some of the poems are his own attempts at translation. Others are occasions for him to think through the generative challenge that is translation. Still others are what he calls “provocative responses to these poets’ provocations.” Each poem has a title and then an indication, in Greek rather than in English, of that poem’s specific conversation partner. For instance, after we read the title of the collection’s first poem, “Still Waiting,” we see, “After Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης.” Here and elsewhere, “after” can mean “in the style of” or “in response to” or simply “coming after.” “Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης” is Constantine Cavafy. But unless you know a little Greek or read with a laptop by your side, the names of Cairns’s interlocutors will remain mysterious, with most readers forced to, as Keats put it, dwell “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A provocation, to be sure.

Then again, dwelling in uncertainties is the state of all pilgrims, and Cairns sees human existence as a pilgrim existence. We’re still waiting, always waiting, perpetually on the way. In 2022, Cairns writes in his introduction, he was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. This diagnosis has shifted his experience of time. How could it not? “The end / appalls,” he writes at one point, “Quite so,” and Correspondence with My Greeks features many poems in which the speaker looks back upon his own earlier life—sometimes with regret, sometimes with pleasure, always with candor—and upon those who have left the world before him. There’s a haunted air to much of the book, the ghostly yet somehow real presence of absent voices, previous selves, long-gone times. In “Vision,” the speaker stands by the side of the river and the present opens up to the past: “Invisible / in the dusk, our lost beloveds gather / along the far bank, murmuring; I hear / their good wishes for my progress. And there, / among them, my father reaches to me / across the current; I see my mother / where she kneels, her hands flat against the stones / paving that far shore.” The speaker hears his father, though the water separates the two of them; the speaker sees his mother, though she remains on that far shore. This poem, and several others in the collection, captures the strangeness of approaching death. The mourned-for seem ever closer, and there’s solace in that fact; the mourned-for remain ever distant, and that distance proves that one is still alive.

“I am not so much inclined / to play with the dead as I am / inclined to visit them,” Cairns writes late in the book, and indeed he doesn’t play with the dead in Correspondence with My Greeks—an act that would demonstrate his power over them. Rather, he visits them, spends time with them, listens to and cares for them, just as he hopes (and prays) that they will listen to and care for him. In “Absences,” one of the book’s loveliest and shortest poems, the speaker brings us into his own experience of loss:

Again, late in the day, the mind attends

to the losses, the absences—my mother

and my father, my dear friends, the child

who visited my wife’s womb so briefly.

 

Again, late in the day, this curious grief

that both tears at the heart and consoles,

save that of the child whose absence

will not by some sweet memory abate.

There’s complexity here: grief hurts us because we mourn for those who have gone; grief comforts us because, when we mourn, the absent become present once again. There’s intelligence here: how surprising to modify “grief” with “curious,” but also how right, as grief allows us to attend in new ways, to know differently that which we’ve lost. Finally, there’s honesty here: some griefs might somehow console, but not others.

And yet, despite or because of this attention to absence, Correspondence with My Greeks also attends to presence, to the delights of sensual and temporal existence. “Here within their honeyed hive,” Cairns writes in “Apiary,” “they hum, / they sing, and—would that you could see them— / they perform their circling dance.” He hears and sees the dance of the bees and he shares it with the reader. In another poem, he praises “the domicile and its every domestic agent,” singing of “the linens and the soap, the scent of apples / conspiring with clove and cinnamon in the pie, / the lamb ragù extending its fragrance throughout / the sunny rooms.” In yet another, walking along a path with cedars overhead, he finds sustaining water: “I press my tin cup / into the froth, the white cascade at the wet road’s / edge, and drinking I taste a water like unto / that water promising ever to satisfy.”

Cairns is a strong Christian poet not because he includes Christian images and liturgical formulations—though he does. (One of the book’s best poems, “Late Prayer,” opens, “Kyrie, may I yet draw near?”) He’s a strong Christian poet because his poems animate, through their music and their rhythms, the “unexpected dangers / and elations” of a life of prayer and worship. Existence is edgeless. The dead remain with us. Silence resounds with music. Timebound existence is touched by eternity. Cairns has found an elusive form that makes these facts felt.

Correspondence with My Greeks
Scott Cairns
Slant Books
$18 | 100 pp.