Soul Make a Path Through Shouting

by Cyrus Cassells

Overview

Enriched by his own world travels, Cassells draws with equal ease from Greek mythology, children's rhymes, and African-American oral traditions. The result is an hypnotic and rhapsodic interweaving of dramatic narratives forming a single whole. "Cassells's writing strikes a balance between exquisite language and an empathy for anyone who is forced to suffer."--Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556590658
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	07/01/1994
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Cyrus Cassells, author of four books of poetry, is a graduate of Stanford Universityand has worked as a translator, film critic, and actor. He has received the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award of the Academy of American Poets and a Lannan Literary Award. Presently he lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches at Southwest Texas State University.

What People are Saying About This

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Soul Make a Path through Shouting is a stunning achievement; wholly human, significant, and unforgettable poetry sung in a rich voice that awakens and dares us: Look at it - simply beautiful.

Editorial Reviews

Cassells's writing strikes a balance between exquisite language and an empathy for anyone who is forced to suffer. And at first, the two might seem incompatible: the first draws on the resources of beauty, while the second must be harsh and real in order to be credible. The book's themes call for a tough language that can adequately haul the burden of oppression; the author attempts to combine his love of ornate phrasing with scenes of violence, shooting for a new effect, a sort of rhapsody of pain. It's surprising how often he makes an impact. Like Pasternak, Cassells excels at merging a sleeping landscape with a moment of crisis. If the goal is to prod us to remember history's atrocities, our constant shudder through the middle sequence of short poems (such as ``These Are Not Brushstrokes,'' ``Search'' and ``The Request'') validate the writer's success. Soul Make a Path Through Shouting presents a new creature in the bestiary of contemporary poetry, related to the leopard: tranquil, regal and sophisticated, with an eye on the jugular. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Few readers who stick with this book to its final page will emerge unaffected. Cassells, an incredibly strong and courageous American poet who lives in Rome and is fluent in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, has produced a volume so vivid, so rich in its use of the language, so profoundly disturbing and bewilderingly refreshing that it takes the breath away. Cassells writes always and wrenchingly of catastrophe-the Holocaust, AIDS, the desecration of our planet, Afghan refugee camps, the Spanish revolution-but the horror is always informed by beauty, by the healing process of struggle, by vitality's very breath. Thus, a deaf-mute Jewish boy, forced by the Nazis to clean the street with his tongue, wets a stone and finds there the image of a flower. In war-torn Spain, an enemy soldier approaches a wounded village girl; just when she believes he's about to kill her he presses "into my hand/A perfect berry." Cassells is probably less successful in his tributes to other men and women-expository description sometimes interrupts the flow of his insights. But on the whole he shows enormous promise of making great contributions to our literary traditions. Recommended for all libraries.-Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward

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