Everything in Life Is Resurrection

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.” In addition, Hinsey lauds Cassells’s always riveting language “characterized throughout by a highly visual and expressive vocabulary, one touched by the grandeur of Shakespeare and the authority of the King James Bible. There is a love of verb and noun, a richness of consonance and assonance, and a voluptuousness that makes a feast of description.” Mark Doty has said: “The astonishing lyric fabric of Cassells’s work is weighted, as true lyrics of the 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. One side of the song doesn’t cancel out the other; they are held, in Cassells’s sweeping oratorios, side by side.”