{"product_id":"correspondence-with-my-greeks-9781639821723","title":"Correspondence with My Greeks","description":"\u003cp\u003eCiting a line from Elizabeth Bishop-\"The bight is littered with old correspondences\"-Scott Cairns avers: \"So, also, is my mind.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIndeed, it was Bishop's \"The Bight\"-encountered late in his undergraduate education-that may have first alerted Cairns to one, key, salutary fact of literary history: virtually every work written over the centuries has been to some degree a \u003cem\u003eresponsive\u003c\/em\u003e text, something of an epistolary response to what the writer beholds-the landscape, the heavens, or-as in most cases-another prior \u003cem\u003etext\u003c\/em\u003e. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn addition to volumes by Coleridge, Keats, Bishop, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Auden, Cairns keeps collections by his beloved Greeks-Kavafy, Elytis, and Seferis-on his writing desk. In corresponding with them, he engages some of the profound and recurring themes of his distinguished career: the mystery of creation (and its absent\/present Creator), the sense that every word-every \u003cem\u003eterm\u003c\/em\u003e-proves to be less a terminus than a point of departure, and a vision of inexhaustible Love transcending all apparent limits, all neat binaries, including that of heaven and hell. These poets have served as his mentors, his provocateurs, and-in his mind at least-his primary audience.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eCorrespondence with My Greeks\u003c\/em\u003e is a work at once deeply human and hauntingly transcendent, the full flowering of the poet's lifelong devotion to the generative power of the word.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Slant Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50901287567634,"sku":"9781639821723","price":24.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_ab3494c3-8603-466e-a050-d4bf9fc4e403.jpg?v=1738420416","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/correspondence-with-my-greeks-9781639821723","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}