Scott Cairns, an assistant professor of English at Westminster College, will be leaving Utah this summer. Not because he's being driven out. But because he's driven.
Cairns will take over the creative writing program at the University of North Texas.And, as a farewell present, he offers his latest collection of poems.
The book is a newly minted volume, but anyone who's followed Cairns' career will recognize many of these pieces. There's "The Sheriff's Last Pronouncement," which the poet read at the "The Painted Word" a good three years ago. There are recognizable poems from "The New Republic" and poems local fans have heard at several readings.
Seeing the poetry pulled together under one cover, one is reminded that Cairns came to the University of Utah as a fiction writer. He is, and will likely remain, a poet in love with fiction. Many poems here are in the voices of legendary characters (from Lucifer to the sheriff of Nottingham), some (such as "Memory") are self-referential poems about the writer's preference for the world of fiction and imagination.
If one theme emerges, it is this: Fanciful inventions will save us from having to deal with numbness.
A line from the poem "Lost Cities: Calvino" sums it up this way:
Drawn from the life of the mind more than daily life, the poems run the risk of getting mired - like so much modern verse - in elitism and irrelevance. Two things, however, keep them from becoming mere filigree embellishments on life. First, the subject matter. Cairns deals in a forthright manner with issues of the heart: religion, death, romantic love, family. And second, there is the poet's supple voice - or better, voices.
You might even call Cairns the Mel Blanc of American poetry. "Translation of Babel" features a good dozen poets: Scott Cairns the social sympathizer, speaking in hushed, democratic tones; Scott Cairns the stand-up comic; Cairns the wise and wizened Latin American bard and Cairns the subtle theologian.
My favorite voice in this book - and a voice that Cairns uses far too seldom, I feel - is the straightforward, conversational Cairns - the Cairns I called "plain spoken" in a review of his previous book. That poet speaks in the voice people use when they wish to tell each other the truth.
"Another Kiss" is just one poem here about the death of the poet's father. I reproduce the final two stanzas:
And so we waited, and I kept my sight
fixed upon his face, which worked with less
conviction - which appeared to acquiesce.
I studied his preference for fainter effort:
the softening of his brow, the rounding
edges and, as if he could speak, the slight
movement of his lips, nearly opening.
All of this, so I would remember the hour
and the moment of my father's death,
so I might rehearse the silent language
of this final speech. His lungs were filling
and gave him less and less reason to breathe.
Lifting briefly, his lips in the semblance
of a kiss, and a kiss, a third kiss, he was gone.
Utah will miss Scott Cairns.