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The British poet W. H. Auden once claimed that the very essence of prayer was "to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying." If Auden is correct (more on that later), then Scott Cairns' Philokalia offers a particularly concentrated set of attentions paid, or, in Auden's terms, prayers. But these are not the selfish and contented prayers many of us recognize because we hear (and pray) them all too often. ("I just want to thank you, Lord.") Cairns' poems singe more often than they soothe.
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A regular contributor to publications such as Image and The Paris Review, Cairns is especially well qualified to playfully and prayerfully provoke readers of contemporary poetry, as well as to provoke contemporary Christian audiences (who may not have encountered current poets who combine Cairns' level of theological directness and poetic skill). Both batches of readers, though, should beware of what Cairns' poems will require of them—a predilection for suspicion and mystery over certainty, and a patient ability to laugh at ourselves.
In his poems (as well as in provocative interviews and essays), Cairns contends that poetry's best function is to expose the spaces between what we know and what we have merely glimpsed or imagined: "Suppose our fixed attention / serves mostly to make evident the gap / dividing what is seen and what is here," writes Cairns in "As We See." Those suppositions and gaps, for Cairns, are where the wonders of faith (and the possibilities of language) reside: "I love the Word's ability to rise again / from chronic homiletic burial."
Along with selections from his four previous collections, Philokalia offers nearly 30 new poems that demonstrate Cairns' mature engagement with his poetic and spiritual legacy and commitments. "Philokalia" means "love of the good or beautiful," a name given to a collection of Greek Patristic texts on the Christian spiritual life. The title reflects Cairns' own commitment to Eastern Orthodoxy, a tradition that saturates the more recent poems.
However, the earlier poems from The Theology of Doubt (1985), The Translations of Babel (1990), Figures for the Ghost (1994), and The Recovered Body (1998) give ample evidence that Cairns has long been developing a love of mystery coupled with a suspicion of certainty. Most striking from these early books are pieces like "Salvation," a poem that comes close to lampooning a church choir that is "an embarrassment," adding "the choir master himself / is ridiculous; the way he stands / tells everyone how short / he thinks he is." But the fun pokes only so long before it prods readers back towards introspection, forcing us to see that we might be too serious in our making fun:
If you glance over this scene
too quickly, or without enough
real humor, you might write off every other
scene it touches, every peripheral
kindness that allows such comic abuse
to abound. You might see the hilarious
faces and believe they are
the whole show; you could miss
the real act …
This real comedy, asserts the poem, is that the "annoyance of grace," and the "tired music of salvation" encompass these quirky singers, especially these. Truth and beauty hide out in unexpected places, Cairns suggests. We can't pin them down but, if we pay attention well enough, the truth might surprise us.
However, we should be careful, the poet tells us of even these truthful surprises. For Cairns, language gestures (one of his favorite terms) toward truth and beauty better than it captures. In an interview Cairns describes this poetic practice: "For me, a poem has to work the way a poem works, which is to say it must offer more than is paraphrasable. It must be susceptible to parabolic reading. If it's a poem in verse, its lines must work as lines, providing a complicating counterpoint to the sense of the syntax. Most simply put, a poem must say more than one thing. A poem must not simply be about an event; it must occasion an event of its own. "
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