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In "The Spiteful Jesus," for example, Cairns contrasts the Jesus "whose courtesy / and kiss unsought are nonetheless / bestowed" with a Savior:

borne to us in the little boat
that first cracked rock at Plymouth
petty, plainly man-inflected
demi-god established as a club
with which our paling
generations might be beaten
to a bland consistency.

The turn on "club," inviting us to see the word's simultaneous exclusion and violence and emphasizing its importance by leaving it at a line break, shows Cairns simultaneously being playful and serious. He challenges readers' expectations of a single term, suggesting that, without knowing it, we may indeed be using Jesus in both senses (as well as others).

When Cairns turns his attention to biblical stories, most notably in "The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Saab" a group of prose poems from The Recovered Body, he may seem most challenging for evangelical readers. In "The Entrance of Sin," for example, Cairns probes the Genesis 3 account of "the beginning of our trouble." The poem contends that sin had come to the garden much earlier than Genesis suggests, appearing "in the midst of an evening stroll, when the woman had reached to take the man's hand, and he withheld it." The problem with sin, the poem discovers, is how it confronts us not suddenly but through a "developing habit of resistance." In the end, what damns the man and woman is not the mere violation of a prohibition, but their desire to withhold from one another, and from God, their own connection and joy. The poem concludes:

The beginning of loss was
this: every time some manner of beauty was
offered and declined, the subsequent isolation
each conceived was irresistible.

In his midrash, Rabbi Saab imports his own parabolic knowledge about the nature of sin and its gradual power to separate us from beauty and from others. The poem becomes the event for this recognition, not only for the poet but for the reader.

How then do such events connect to Auden's assertion about prayer? Cairns tries to answer with numerous poems about prayer, coming each time to an insight like these lines in "To Himself:"

A book I borrowed once taught me
how in the midst of attendant
prayer comes a pause when The Addressed
requires nothing else be said. Yes,
I witnessed once an emptying
like that; though what I saw was not
quite seen of course. I suspected
nonetheless a silent Other
silently regarding me as if He
still might speak, but speak as to Himself.

Poetry, then, is not quite prayer, but it can be a way of describing and discovering how we might comport ourselves when we do experience the unexpected regard of this "silent Other."

David Wright is visiting assistant professor of English at Wheaton College. His latest collection of poetry is A Liturgy for Stones (Cascadia, 2003).

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