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Citing a line from ElizabethBishopThe bight is littered with old correspondencesScott Cairns avers:So, also, is my mind. Indeed,it was Bishops The Bightencountered late in his undergraduateeducationthat may have first alerted Cairns to one, key, salutary fact ofliterary history: virtually every work written over the centuries has been tosome degree a responsive text, something of an epistolary response to what thewriter beholdsthe landscape, the heavens, oras in most casesanother priortext. Inaddition to volumes by Coleridge, Keats, Bishop, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, andAuden, Cairns keeps collections by his beloved GreeksKavafy, Elytis, andSeferison his writing desk. In corresponding with them, he engages some of theprofound and recurring themes of his distinguished career: the mystery ofcreation (and its absent/present Creator), the sense that every wordeverytermproves to be less a terminus than a point of departure, and a vision ofinexhaustible Love transcending all apparent limits, all neat binaries,including that of heaven and hell. These poets have served as his mentors, hisprovocateurs, andin his mind at leasthis primary audience. Correspondencewith My Greeks is a work at once deeply human andhauntingly transcendent, the full flowering of the poets lifelong devotion tothe generative power of the word.