Everything in Life is Resurrection
Selected Poems, 1982-2022
Drawn from eight acclaimed books of poetry and spanning forty years, Everything in Life is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982-2022, is 2021 Texas Poet Laureate Cyrus Cassells’s long-awaited retrospective volume. Ellen Hinsey, in her compelling introduction, “A Lyric Poet in Dark Times,” heralds Cassells as “America’s foremost lyric poet, who, under the pressure of adverse circumstances, has turned from his home in music to unflinchingly face the blood and havoc of his era’s civil sphere.” Hinsey makes revealing comparisons with Yeats’s trajectory from high lyricism to poems of lament and Irish Civil War witness: “when we read Cassells’s work over the last four decades, we are aware that the music he hears is intrinsically intertwined with the noise of the world’s destruction.”
Is There Room For Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?
Cyrus Cassells has perfected a poetics of merciful vitality and tenderness, celebrating eros — in his daring and prolific representation of lust, yes, but more broadly in his understanding of the erotic as an affirmation and preservation of life — through time and space. Beginning his latest collection with the piece “You Be the Dancer,” he bids us return to sacred sites of nostalgia, insisting on it “whether we’re feeling frisky, / Empty-handed, / Or still beguiled by inchoate dreams–.” Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? is the apotheosis of Cassells’s work to elevate the mundane and the bodily to the exalted, his vigorous lyrics a routine ecstasy. Though our senses lay us bare to suffering, they also create the possibilities for pleasure and connection, the basis of — and rewards for — humanity.
To The Cypress Again and Again
- The Texas Institute of Letters’ Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2022 and 2023 (co-winner)
“At this particular darkening hour in Europe, we are graced by Cyrus Cassells’s homage to Salvador Espriu. A survivor of Spain’s civil war, who then became an internal émigré, Espriu intimately knew the cost of war and destruction. In exquisite, moving poems such as Sinera Cemetery, masterfully rendered by Cassells, we encounter Espriu’s grieved, but resolute, fortitude: ‘Liberty, the enduring word I utter time and again/between ancient boundaries/of vineyards and the sea.’ Cassells’s dialogue with Espriu is a gift, an enactment of the sacred pledge to uphold, against all odds, the ‘enduring word.’” – Ellen Hinsey, author of The Illegal Age and Update on the Descent.
The World That the Shooter Left Us
- Finalist, Housatonic Book Award in Poetry, 2023
In the aftermath of the Stand Your Ground killing of his close friend’s father, poet Cassells explores, in his most fearless book to date, the brutality, bigotry, and betrayal at the heart of current America. Taking his cue from the Civil Rights and Vietnam War era poets and songwriters who inspired him in his youth, Cassells presents The World That the Shooter Left Us, a frank, bulletin-fierce indictment of unraveling democracy in an embattled America, in a world still haunted by slavery, by Guernica, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust, by climate catastrophe, by countless battles, borders, and broken promises–adding new grit, fire, and luster to his forty-year career as a dedicated and vital American poet.
More Than Watchmen At Daybreak
“In Cyrus Cassells’s visionary work, the mundane becomes sublime and the sublime is rendered accessible, something we can touch and feel. Descriptions of haunting beauty slip with ease and grace from the poet’s pen. ‘With pallid embroideries of ice, / The blessed Jerusalem of the pewter river…’—words that make sacred and startlingly visual the very fabric of our lives.” – Stephanie Sinclair Lightsmith
A stunningly beautiful and moving group of twelve related poems written while the author was resident without internet or phone in a Benedictine monastery near Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch.
Still Life With Children
- The Texas Institute of Letters’ Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019
Cyrus Cassells’ vibrant translations grow on the page as though the essence of Francesc Parcerisas’ work has also moved forward in a Janus-like fashion. These translations are not simply the same poems in a different language; Cassells has crafted new poetry. The gentle and delicate rhythms of Parcerisas have been contracted into shorter lines that explore sharper cadences whilst Cassells carefully maintains a sensitive continuity in the opening feet. This is poetry for the ear first and the page second, Cassells has stronger consonants at his disposal, a resource that he skillfully exploits.
The Gospel According to Wild Indigo
- Finalist, Balcones Poetry Prize, 2018
- Finalist, Helen C. Smith Award for the Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2019
- Finalist, 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. Throughout, Cassells invites the reader to consider the duality of grief and love, as well as the shifting connections between past and present.
The Crossed-Out Swastika
- Finalist, Balcones Poetry Prize, 2012
“Cassells is a passionate poet whose poems touch the core of human connection through which can flow union with the infinite. Highly recommended.” – Library Journal
Cyrus Cassells’ fifth book commemorates the blazing integrity of young people caught in the vise of World War II. In its journey through the “anti-miracle” of Europe’s embattled past, The Crossed-Out Swastika follows the lives of historical and semi-fictional characters to unearth and amplify moments of almost impossible music, bravery, beauty, and redemption, illuminating the human spirit against unspeakable tyranny.
More Than Peace and Cypresses
- Library Journal‘s Best Poetry Books of 2004
Cyrus Cassells’s fourth volume of poetry is an elegiac “book of heroes,” a lyric homage to the “artistic fathers” who taught him “the truth-or-bust beauty of passion transformed / into sheer compassion.”
In the wake of his father’s death, Cassells returned 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, Attilio and Bernardo Bertolucci, and García Lorca are among those invoked and revisited in order to brace Cassells through his mourning, and to serve as touchstones in his search for the meaning of gallantry and quest for courage and expression.
Beautiful Signor
- Lambda Literary Award, Gay Men’s Poetry
- Sister Circle Poetry Award (co-winner)
- Finalist, Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in Poetry
- Pulitzer Prize nomination
Beautiful Signor is a trenchant search for beauty in a world ravaged by cruelty. In the face of the AIDS pandemic and the specter of sexual wounding, Beautiful Signor gracefully reminds us of “romantic, erotic love as a gateway to spiritual love” (American Bookseller). With unwavering tenderness these poems bring the enduring legacy of the troubadours and Sufi poets into a modern lyric tradition.
Soul Make a Path Through Shouting
- William Carlos Williams Award, Poetry Society of America
- Finalist, Lenore Marshall Prize for Best Poetry Book of 1994
- Pulitzer Prize nomination
- Runner-Up, AWP Prize in Poetry
“Cassells’s writing strikes a balance between exquisite language and an empathy for anyone who is forced to suffer.” – Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 1994
“The most spectacular book I’ve seen in years.” – Rita Dove
Soul Make A Path Through Shouting is Cyrus Cassells’s second book. Enriched both mythologically and experientially by his world travels, Cassells makes the vital journey of his poetry inward, a search for spiritual grace drawing from Greek mythology, children’s rhymes, and African-American oral traditions. The result is an often hypnotic and rhapsodic interweaving of dramatic narratives forming a single whole.
The Mud Actor
- Selected for the National Poetry Series by Al Young, 1981
- Finalist, Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in Poetry
“The Mud Actor finds its most powerful images in the poems of childhood and in the moving poem ‘The Memory of Hiroshima’…, Cassells’ ultimate testimony to the human spirit. The cumulative nature of the book is powerful, and allows us to agree with the poet at the end that ‘Everything in life is resurrection.’” – Library Journal
CYRUS CASSELLS 