Poems describe the author's childhood, the life of artists in nineteenth-century France, and a past life as a Japanese victim at Hiroshima

The Mud Actor

Literature & Fiction

Cassells, Cyrus

History & Criticism

Henry Holt Co.

Mud Actor

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

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.”

The Gospel according to Wild Indigo (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

Poetry

Southern Illinois University Press

A reissuing of The Mud Actor, the debut collection of poetry by Cyrus Cassells.

The Mud Actor (Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary)

Carnegie-Mellon University Press

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

Soul Make a Path Through Shouting

United States

Copper Canyon Press

Soul Make A Path Through Shouting

A trenchant search for beauty amidst a world ravaged by cruelty.

Beautiful Signor

Cyrus Cassells’ 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.
Throughout his travels—and especially while contemplating flamenco culture—Cassells experiences the juxtaposition of mourning with unanticipated gusts of love and eroticism. Lush Andalusian-based poems emphasize the present’s power for surprise and renewal, while his elegies are ecstatic, erotic and sometimes comic. Questing and elemental, elegantly lyrical, More Than Peace and Cypresses arcs beyond grief to celebrate the fleeting majesty of our lives.
From “Way of the Duende”:
The day mind gone, Lord, and all the stringencies, the day’s bright yokes, the day’s heavy bridles of status: flamenco as an impassioned celebration of night, of duende, of mystery’s warrens and arabesques— Romans, Carthaginians, phantom Moors wander through the redemptive, incantatory dancing—
Cyrus Cassells’ previous books have earned the William Carlos Williams award, a Lambda Book Award, and a selection as “Best of the Year” by Publishers Weekly. He teaches at Southwest Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.

More Than Peace and Cypresses

"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.
Poet, from cellar to cellar, I remember I held onto, of all things,
a picture book about a magical goat, inscribed by my witty father:
This storybook belongs to Mademoiselle Sabine
the way Paris once belonged to Marie Antoinette—
Somehow having that book helped me to endure . . .
Cyrus Cassells grew up in the Mojave Desert. He graduated from Stanford University and has worked as a translator, film critic, and actor; he currently teaches poetry in the MFA program at Texas State University–San Marcos. He lives in Austin, Texas.

The Crossed-Out Swastika

To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu

Stephen F. Austin University Press

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