Book Review: Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems of Scott Cairns

Abstract

Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems of Scott Cairns. By Scott Cairns. Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2015. 360 pp. $39.00 (paper).Scott Cairns has been an important Christian poet for thirty years. Beginning with Theology of Doubt, his reticent, likeable narrators-worthy to stand in with Hawthorne's-his marvelously comic, self-conscious language choices, and his profoundly Christian understanding of the human condition have become staples to anyone who has taken the time to read poetry during that timeframe. And, amazingly, beyond all of that, he has managed to write authentic Christian verse while couching his body-poems in speech which does not put off the secular reader. Tolkien and O'Connor would delight to see such sacramental stealth in action! Cairns's Slow Pilgrim is a must-read for anyone who loves Christian poetry: something to take down from your shelves on a snowy winter night-just you, the lamp, and a crackling fire. Feel the pages, read a few aloud, muse. What could be better!In this review I will focus on his collection of poems from Idiot Psalms (2014), which I had not seen before and found nicely rewarding. The poet's familiar parameters have widened. The focus is still on the solitary man, his fight to place himself, but we see Christ do violence to the usual expectations as well.Dawn at Saint Anna's Skete is a perfect example of how Cairns keeps stretching into the new, into the Spirit who always asks for more. Consider the first five lines:The air is cool and right with birdsongas our files out, of a suddendisinterred from three sepulchral hours of prayerinto an amber brilliance riotingoutside the cemetery chapel.... (p. 270)Right thick might put the uninitiated reader off, as it comes across as a self-conscious slippage in diction. Cairns is not of the backwoods, and his language choices are usually so precise. So why do this? The answer, I think, lies with the Spirit, who will not permit comfort. We are made free by his presence, obliged to break familiar constraints; and that is what Cairns is up to here. Love will not be bound in this world; neither will it be bound by language. The self-consciousness of the poetic act here only serves to foreground that fact.The rest is typical Cairns: the bleary crew is no band of hosannasinging fundamentalists; and the entire third line, again very self-consciously, brings our situation as fallen but good believers into the light. …