Lacunae

New poetry from Scott Cairns on containing the uncontainable

Often, when speaking of what he has called the poetic operation of language, Scott Cairns has characterized that event as our “glimpsing an indeterminate, inexhaustible enormity within a discrete space.” This is the poet’s continuing fascination with lacunae, those spaces, those openings that offer more within than appearances can register from outside the ostensible covert of their terms. Cairns is here focused upon how an image, a word, or—in the case of the Theotokos—a womb can contain the uncontainable. As Orthodox hymnography avers, she is more spacious than the heavens. So, too, the poet suggests, in its own, modest way, the poem might give birth to more, and more, and yet more than even the poet supposes.