Scott Cairns
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Anaphora : New Poems
$20.00Add to cartAnaphora-the repetition of a word or phrase-is a strategy that assists coherence, and draws attention to the repeated terms. In Eucharistic settings, it also indicates the specific liturgical moment when the bread and wine are consecrated, becoming what we in the Eastern Church are pleased to name the Holy Mysteries. Certain poems in this collection employ overt anaphora; many do not. Still, they invite a sense of words as doing more than naming, more than serving as arrows pointing to prior substance; intermittently, these words may acquire due substance of their own, partaking of more than is apparent, but is nonetheless so, and is present.
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Short Trip To The Edge
$16.99Add to cartPoet and literature professor Scott Cairns ran headlong into his midlife crisis while walking on the beach with his Labrador. His was not a desperate attempt to recapture youth, filled with sports cars and younger women. Instead, Cairns realized his spiritual life was advancing at a snail’s pace and time was running out. Midlife crisis for this Baptist turned Eastern Orthodox manifested as a desperate need to seek out prayer.
This new, expanded edition of A Short Trip to the Edge is the story of Scott’s spiritual journey to the mystical island of Mt. Athos. With twenty monasteries and thirteen sketes scattered across its sloping terrain, the Holy Mountain was the perfect place for Scott to seek out a prayer father and discover the stillness of the true prayer life. Includes both maps and photographs.
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Slow Pilgrim : The Collected Poems Of Scott Cairns
$39.00Add to cartScott Cairns has carefully preserved every poem he’s ever published that he cares to preserve. He’s also added previously unpublished work, spanning three decades. A careful introduction by Gregory Wolfe and tribute preface by Richard Howard make this the ultimate collection of Cairns’ work.
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Idiot Psalms : New Poems
$21.00Add to cartA new collection from one of our favorite poets. Fourteen “Idiot Psalms,” surrounded by dozens of other poems, make this his most challenging collection yet.
“Idiot Psalm 1”
O God Beloved if obliquely so,
dimly apprehended in the midst
of this, the fraught obscuring fog
of my insufficiently capacious ken,
Ostensible Lover of our kind–while
apparently aloof–allow
that I might glimpse once more
Your shadow in the land, avail
for me, a second time, the sense
of dire Presence in the pulsing
hollow near the heart.
Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline
your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy
of immolation, if You will. -
End Of Suffering
$16.99Add to cartCan we put our afflictions to good use? Do they have meaning?
This beautiful, small, book is a thoughtful inquiry through which Scott Cairns hopes to come to terms with what he calls “the puzzlement of our afflictions.” Drawing upon personal experience and a compelling range of early Christian traditions, Cairns offers the fruit of his pondering of suffering-his own, yours, ours.
In doing so, he assembles witnesses-poets, prophets, and a gathering of wise men and women spanning centuries and cultures. Their insight will challenge and help you to appreciate the radical revision of human experience that Christ has established.
