More Than Peace and Cypresses

Cyrus Cassells

Cyrus Cassells’s fourth volume of poems explores the poet’s spiritual and artistic patrimony. In the wake of his father’s death from cancer, the poet returns to Italy, France, and Spain—countries that nurtured him as a young writer—to investigate the sources of his inspiration. Vincent Van Gogh, Cesare Pavese, Eugenio Montale, Giorgio Bassani, Attilio and Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Federico García Lorca are invoked, revisited, and revered to brace the poet through his mourning.

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ISBN: 9781556592140

Format: Paperback

Vesuvius as Sleeping Beauty

We had stopped to collect
windfall figs, a few
truant or crimp-backed flowers;
at the placid edge
of Signora Aponte’s venerable
garden on Capri,
Vesuvius as Sleeping Beauty,
boatlights like glittering foil
employed in nubile vineyards
to deceive the starlings—

You held the wild, surviving
lily to my face.
Suddenly we were more than
distinct, adjacent solitudes.

Suddenly I was filled with the dark
amber of the island’s singing.

About the Author

A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Cyrus Cassells has also been a recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. He was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the AWP Poetry Prize, the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and twice for the Balcones Prize (in 2012 and 2018) for Outstanding Book of the Year. His first book, The Mud …

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Reviews

“In what the poet calls his ‘book of heroes,’ Cassells returns to Italy, France, and Spain after his father’s death and resurrects the poetic voices that guided and inspired him in his youth… [Cassells’s] enormous passion and soft touch create images that are both delicious and haunting. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“… These lyrical, pastoral poems reveal how far the shattered heart reaches into the earth for poetic truth.” —Bloomsbury Review

“What readers will love is the quietly gorgeous language Cassells delivers as he copes with loss.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Cassells’s poems are enthralling—they are heartfelt, with the largeness of spirit found in great literature… Cassells is one of the most exciting poets writing in the US today.” —Rita Dove