No Second Eden: Poems

By Turner Cassity

If you think that Turner Cassity has mellowed or slowed down since the 1998 release of his selected poems, The Destructive Element, think again. In No Second Eden Cassity is back more Swiftian than ever. Among the targets reduced to ruin are countertenors, parole boards, the French Symbolists, calendar reformers, the Yale Divinity School, and the cult of Elvis. Without turning a blind eye, he even extends a toast to Wernher von Braun.

Surprisingly, there is a poem about the Mississippi in which Cassity grew up. Unsurprisingly, it is a vision quite unlike others of that state. Its chilly and amusing precision is about as far from Southern Gothic as you can get, although elsewhere there are faint hints of a failed Good Ole Boy. Indeed, the final poems in the collection are a bit more personal than one expects of this writer.

As rigorous in form as they are in feeling, the poems of No Second Eden are not for those with preconceived ideas of poetry or its purpose. Early in Cassity’s career, James Merrill described Cassity’s work as “an opera house in the jungle.” True so far as it goes, but he might also have called it the jungle in the opera house: a glimpse at the savagery behind every façade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2002
• ISBN: 9780804040044

Turner Cassity

Turner Cassity was born in 1929 in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. He retired in 1991 as a catalog librarian at the R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University.

Book preview

A Member of the Mystik Krewe

For reasons having partially

To do with Carnival as it

Runs out of steam just off of St.

Charles Avenue in March of nineteen

forty-six, an Ole Miss end

Has Celestine the Oyster Girl’s

Assistant’s former girlfriend’s breast

Entirely out, and to the mild

Approval of the bar, is, with

A ballpoint pen, inscribing there.

I’m seventeen; I’m underage.

It is the first time I have seen

A ballpoint pen. And now that boob

(The football player) hands to each

And all, as though it were his cast

To autograph, the fragrant globe,

The white geography. I have at hand

The offered whole. What shall I write?

Another writer, not yet I,

Takes hold, and for a moment knows.

The pen is cold; a hot skin tight.

The flesh is there. What shall I write?

The Metrist at the Operetta

By tuning somewhat low the second violins

And somewhat high the first, the two-faced Viennese

Attain the sound of sugar, just as, hurrying

The second beat, they CPR three-quarter time.

Exactitude is not a way to animate,

And, although honesty may be a policy,

It’s not a beat to dance to. Face it: in the arts

It is the tricks that are the trade. The firm head snap

That holds at bay a ballet dancer’s vertigo;

Perspective (false perspective being no more false

Than any); make-up and impersonation; trope.

A metronome confirms clockmakers’ art, not this.

Stylization and Its Failures

The vulture, at the least, has not the look

Of flying money, or a Seal of State

Become a Frisbee. Eagles on a coin

Or on a flag, or on a Roman standard,

Look more real than in real life, so strong

Has been convention. Formula and frame

Do not apply at roadkill, which is why

No march from any empire has been called

Under the Double Buzzard. One death’s-head

Is quite enough. Upon a currency

It would suggest the god who is not mocked

Is Moloch, and on specie make it clear

All gold is in a sense fool’s gold. Not, there,

A logo to encourage free exchange;

Reminder, rather, that we barter life

In kind, to have corruption as return.

Ambitious Scout whose merit badges mass,

Would you continue if you knew the end

Is Court of Honor for a scavenger?

Bald Eagle, Vulture of the Naked