Anaphora: New Poems

By Scott Cairns

Anaphora—the repetition of a word or phrase—is a strategy that assists coherence, and draws attention to the repeated terms. In Eucharistic settings, it also indicates the specific liturgical moment when the bread and wine are consecrated, becoming what we in the Eastern Church are pleased to name the Holy Mysteries.

Certain poems in this collection employ overt anaphora; many do not. Still, they invite a sense of words as doing more than naming, more than serving as arrows pointing to prior substance; intermittently, these words may acquire due substance of their own, partaking of more than is apparent, but is nonetheless so, and is present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781640604537

Scott Cairns

Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of ten poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.

Book preview