In an interview in 2009, Scott Cairns said one way he identified a good poem was, “if by the first or second line I’m already entertaining secondary and tertiary senses, already attending to the line’s suggestive ambiguities, then I know I’m in the presence of a genuine poem.” I came upon this quote after rereading his 2023 book Lacunae for this review, and the quote makes sense both as a general rubric for engaging poetry and for enjoying and analyzing Cairns’ own poetry. He is a master of secondary and tertiary senses, and suggestive ambiguities, and has been for eighteen published books and chapbooks since his first publication in 1982.
The title of the new collection, a plural form of the word “lacuna,” means apparent pockets of emptiness or blank space. Does Cairns then think of the poems in this book as a collection of emptinesses, voids, or perhaps mysteries? The first poem in the book immediately puts this idea to rest. In the poem named “Recuperating Lacunae,” he explains
Each of these lacunae, he says, is like a cove or a “cup” that is
Secondary and tertiary senses are already appearing: the “cup” in the title “Recuperating Lacunae,” is echoed twice more in the poem. Furthermore, the “cup” is also a “discrete cove.” A cove? A quick dictionary search revealed another clue; lacuna comes from the same root word as “lagoon,” the Latin word lacus or “lake.” So Lacunae are distinct coves, pools, or cups which are “abysmally full…roiling with boundless abundance.” I suddenly become more aware of my smallness and Cairns’ amazing artistic vision. Every word, sometimes every syllable contains multiple ideas, and Cairns’ project is to glimpse with his readers divine realities that swirl unseen around us.
I am honored to be a former student of Cairns, and he deigns to respond to my emails. I asked him to clarify the choice of the book title and in response, he described his experience of writing “as a way of glimpsing, of suspecting a reality that exceeds me, a reality that exceeds, even, creation; it is a practice that, I trust, will avail for me a momentary, provisional apprehension of the inexhaustible Truth.” To express it less elegantly, the craft of poetry for him is a means of catching snatches of the things of God. To read the book then is to go with the author in search of a reality beyond and exceeding even the created order.
To continue the theme, a short way into the collection is another poem titled simply “Lacunae” with an epigraph from Dickinson, “the spreading wide my narrow hands to gather paradise—”
Each poem is “gift of difficult syntax,” a delightful phrase that describes, if I understand correctly, the desired effect upon his readers
I take this to mean that a poem is potentially a vessel of abundance that is able to ground us, to tighten our grip on serious matters, or to state it in the reverse as the poem does, to “free both text and reader from” triviality or superficiality, or from drinking too slightly from the dizzying cup of life’s issues.
Those to whom Cairns’ style is familiar and beloved will find more of his infinite cleverness, his winsome colloquialisms, his penchant for using verbs like “avails” and “obtains” in the intransitive, and his love for all things Greek and Orthodox. Readers of his previous collections such as the 2014 collection Idiot Psalms will recognize the pilgrim’s wry prayer banter, blinking and gazing into the abyss, such as these lines addressed to heaven from “Ain’t No Meta. Ain’t No Nevamind.”
Cairns’ search for the “inexhaustible Truth” is not to suggest that his feet are anywhere but planted in the physical world. Lacunae contains three sections, the third of which is called, as if to leave no question, “No Transcendence.” The first poem, with the same title, deprecates the pursuit of transcendence, or higher things surpassing the material universe, in favor of immanence, that which is within the limits of possible experience or knowledge.
I asked Cairns which poem in the collection he thinks is the most representative of his vision for the book. He said that the last poem in the book, titled “Télos [Τέλος],” “may get closest to my sense of what I would call the expansiveness glimpsed in a discrete space.” I quote the poem here in its entirety.
Despite my own amateur grasp of poetry, and despite the gift of difficult syntax, I found that, as with his other writings, I was able to understand and delight in the entire collection with only a few exceptions. Often a poem is like a little word puzzle, which may require a clear head and reading out loud to parse. But Cairns’ own friendliness and humor comes through his work, drawing the reader in, exciting him with artistry, and at the same time revealing great depths of vision and faith. Poetry buffs and newbies like me need to spend unhurried time with this collection that has captivated my love and appreciation.
Lacunae is available from Paraclete Press, https://paracletepress.com/products/lacunae
Jeffrey Allen Mays’ short fiction has been published in Catapult/Topology Magazine, Please See Me, and God and Nature. His debut novel The Former Hero was published in 2014 by AEC Stellar Publishing and became winner of the 2015 Texas Association of Authors Book Award as well as finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards. In 2020 Jeffrey received his MFA and now teaches writing at St. Edwards and Concordia Universities in Austin, Texas.