The Gospel according to Wild Indigo

by Cyrus Cassells

Overview

Finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize, 2018
Finalist for the Helen C. Smith Award for the Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2019
Nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature in Poetry, 2019

Consisting of two dynamic song cycles, Cyrus Cassells’s sixth poetry volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, keeps the reader on edge with a timeless and beguiling feast of language that fuses together history, memory, and family.
 
The first cycle, rooted in the culture of the Gullah people of Charleston and the Sea Islands, celebrates the resilience of the rice- and indigo-working slaves and their descendants who have forged a unique Africa-inspired language and culture. Set against a Mediterranean backdrop, the second cycle explores themes of pilgrimage, love, and loss, concluding with a pair of elegies to the poet’s mother and the many men lost in the juggernaut of the AIDS crisis. Throughout, Cassells invites the reader to consider the duality of grief and love, as well as the shifting connections between past and present.
 
Cassells’s language is always striking, unpredictable, and beautiful, conjuring a world not only of “placid seagulls perched / in priest-gentle pines / like festive Christmas ornaments” but also one where “Death prevailed, / tireless as a forest partisan.” His poems transport the reader across time, space, and language, searching constantly not just for empathy but also for the human spirit in its triumph, for “our human joy, / laced with an ageless grieving.”
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809336609
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	02/22/2018
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Cyrus Cassells is the author of The Mud Actor, winner of the 1981 National Poetry Series Competition; Soul Make a Path through Shouting, nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Beautiful Signor, winner of the Lambda Literary Award; and The Crossed-Out Swastika, finalist for the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2012. He teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.
 

Read an Excerpt

II. A Is for Augustus

On a glove-yellow morning
of gleaming oyster shells,

crow-carried mussels,
placid seagulls perched

in priest-gentle pines
like festive Christmas ornaments,

beside an alluring Sea Island beach,
I first met up-front A.-

Bring your high yellow self
over here!

The name's Augustus
but folks call me A.-

Like vying truants with never-fail
cat's-eye marbles,

in no time flat, we traded
lived-to-tell tales

of our rambunctious
"North Cackalacky" childhoods-

an invigorating banter laced
with a tattoo of lapping water.

Later, when brash Mr. A. bent,
in a lazybones glory,

to brush my lips for the first time,
a snatch-gossip gust

hurled his cracked-brimmed hat
into a busybody

chorus of reeds, an eager-to-hear
amen corner,

and he darted, almost doe-quick,
to retrieve

the rash, wayward owl
of his windblown hat:

in-a-rush Augustus of the cattails,
the Indian summer estuary.


XV. The Hurricane

All the windows are open to the sea,
the murmur of Atlantic coral:

smash them,
smash them with your song,

wild to the Western ear-
And who are you,

with your stripping punches-
you're uprooting the palms,

you're tearing the leaves-
oh what you love is the skeletal-

and who am I,
that you would take my verdant snake,

my blessed island,
and dash it to pieces?

If this day, this aftermath,
is a thorny school,

the sere light and the day,
then what is the lesson in it?

That the gift is always imperiled?
That the swart, surviving horses,

the veteran palms seem
more alive now, more alive?

In the iron, gargantuan hush:
medicine and smithereens,

a fierce concentration
on cherishing the living.

From spirit back to spirit again;
dash it to pieces, Creator, Destroyer,

you pirate god, Huracan,
with your ferocious gangplank,

your pitiless and raucous
wind-that-will-ensure-grief-

And yet it dares to be born,
mud-fresh, mud-fresh,

like a foal,
amid the wreckage, the bankruptcy:

from spirit into flesh again:
resilience.


RETURN TO FLORENCE

How do I convey the shoring gold
at the core of the Florentine bells'

commingled chimes?
Vast as a suddenly revealed

sea of wheat,
that up-and-away gold

is equivalent to the match-burst
morning I returned,

intent as doubting Thomas,
to my old classroom terrace,

open to the showy, blue yes
of the bustling Arno,

to my timeless, sun-laved
Basilica di Santo Spirito,

and discovered
ebullient citizens reciting,

at a hundred different posts,
the same unbetraying passage

of Dante's Paradise.

 

Table of Contents

I The Gospel According to Wild Indigo

The Gospel according to Wild Indigo 3

I Dayclean 3

II A Is for Augustus 5

III A.'s Childhood 7

IV The Pine-Tree Sweetens My Body 9

V A Gullah Valentine (Nearabout Spring) 11

VI The Low Country Magazine 14

VII Communion 16

VIII Caesars and Dreamers 20

IX Wild Indigo, Because 22

X The White Iris Beautifies Me 23

XI Moon-Huggers 25

XII The Abandoned Name 26

XIII Deacon Costen's Handclap Joy 28

XIV I'll Take You to Africa 31

XV The Hurricane 33

XVI A Siren Patch of Indigo 35

XVII Itzak's Mighty Oak 37

XVIII The Gospel according to Wild Indigo 39

II Lovers Borrowing the Language of Cicadas

Return to Florence 45

The Pines of the Villa Pamphili 46

Ethos 48

Federico's Querencia 50

In Robert Graves's Mallorcan Garden 55

The Red-Haired Puppet 56

The Shadow 58

If Van Gogh Didn't Shoot Himself, Who Did Shoot Him? 60

Two Poets Quarreling under the Jacarandas 62

Pentimento 74

Massimo and Silver 77

Jasmine 80

Lovers Borrowing the Language of Cicadas 81

The Sibyl's Song 84

Antinoüs 86

Necropolis 88

Lazaretto 91

Spring and the Spirit of Saint Joan 95

A Tale of Two Hikers 97

Elegy with a Gold Cradle 99

Acknowledgments 103

Editorial Reviews

"The Gospel according to Wild Indigo is a formal achievement for the sheer beauty and musicality of the verse, but is also much more: it is a prayer book, a testament, a lover’s discourse, and a philosopher’s stone. Richly peopled with characters living and dead, personal and famous (including Saint Joan, Keats, Robert Graves, and Van Gogh), the individual lines are what architects might call “load-bearing walls”: they give but don’t crumble under the corporeal weight the speaker puts upon them, with a bravura display of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs: an “unlatched treasure trove” of lavish excess that both overjoys and sates the senses."—Virginia Konchan, Kenyon Review

“The Gospel according to Wild Indigo is an ecstasy, a god’s-eye-view of place, time, and the vivid revelations of flesh and spirit. Cassells strides from Georgia Low Country to Van Gogh’s Auvers to a tank pulling out of Dachau, and rapturously on and on. In this great sweep, I recognize a poet at the height of his powers becoming ‘all poetry, / all silence and verse.’”—Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and current U.S. Poet Laureate

“‘A true Gullah valentine / would surely have to feature / Low Country branches graced,’ writes Cyrus Cassells, and boy, does he, in the beautifully arresting lyric of The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, where a reader, battered by mean weather, may enter a world that is, like Neruda’s ElementaryOdes, a paradise of small things, and the memory of the overlooked is justice, if the poet sings it true. This is how a poet, as he reaches the peak of his considerable powers, sings it true.”—Cornelius Eady, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist

“At a time of spiritual uncertainty, America’s most important lyric poet offers us a gospel on the ways of the world and the spirit. These poems, rooted in the experience of the enslaved but also the free spirit, come and lift us up. What does The Gospel according to Wild Indigo teach us? In these beautifully crafted poems we learn that darkness is of our own making and that the potential splendor of the spirit lies always within our scope: resident in the magnificence of the natural world and in the possibility of human communication, eros, and reconciliation. At this most unlikely of moments, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo comes to our rescue.”—Ellen Hinsey, Yale Younger Poets Prize winner

“The astonishing lyric fabric of this book is weighted, as the true lyrics of earth must be, with the sorrow and cruelty of history. The sparkle of light on waves, the ‘foam and fish-scale blue’ of wild indigo can only be sung honestly beside the memory of the Middle Passage, ‘the well-deep dark of the hold, . . . thick as blackstrap syrup.’ One side of the song doesn’t cancel out the other; they are held, in Cassells’s sweeping oratorio, side by side. Love and holocaust, poetry and fascism; can the dialectic ever cease? Still, the overriding quality of this gospel is joy, earned both by the poet’s art and the world’s often haphazard lurch toward justice.”—Mark Doty, National Book Award winner
 

From the Publisher