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

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

"The Gospel according to Wild Indigo is a formal achievement for the sheer beauty and musicality of the verse, but is also much more: it is a prayer book, a testament, a lover’s discourse, and a philosopher’s stone. Richly peopled with characters living and dead, personal and famous (including Saint Joan, Keats, Robert Graves, and Van Gogh), the individual lines are what architects might call “load-bearing walls”: they give but don’t crumble under the corporeal weight the speaker puts upon them, with a bravura display of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs: an “unlatched treasure trove” of lavish excess that both overjoys and sates the senses."—Virginia Konchan, Kenyon Review

“The Gospel according to Wild Indigo is an ecstasy, a god’s-eye-view of place, time, and the vivid revelations of flesh and spirit. Cassells strides from Georgia Low Country to Van Gogh’s Auvers to a tank pulling out of Dachau, and rapturously on and on. In this great sweep, I recognize a poet at the height of his powers becoming ‘all poetry, / all silence and verse.’”—Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and current U.S. Poet Laureate

“‘A true Gullah valentine / would surely have to feature / Low Country branches graced,’ writes Cyrus Cassells, and boy, does he, in the beautifully arresting lyric of The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, where a reader, battered by mean weather, may enter a world that is, like Neruda’s ElementaryOdes, a paradise of small things, and the memory of the overlooked is justice, if the poet sings it true. This is how a poet, as he reaches the peak of his considerable powers, sings it true.”—Cornelius Eady, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist

“At a time of spiritual uncertainty, America’s most important lyric poet offers us a gospel on the ways of the world and the spirit. These poems, rooted in the experience of the enslaved but also the free spirit, come and lift us up. What does The Gospel according to Wild Indigo teach us? In these beautifully crafted poems we learn that darkness is of our own making and that the potential splendor of the spirit lies always within our scope: resident in the magnificence of the natural world and in the possibility of human communication, eros, and reconciliation. At this most unlikely of moments, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo comes to our rescue.”—Ellen Hinsey, Yale Younger Poets Prize winner

“The astonishing lyric fabric of this book is weighted, as the true lyrics of 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, ‘the well-deep dark of the hold, . . . thick as blackstrap syrup.’ One side of the song doesn’t cancel out the other; they are held, in Cassells’s sweeping oratorio, side by side. Love and holocaust, poetry and fascism; can the dialectic ever cease? Still, the overriding quality of this gospel is joy, earned both by the poet’s art and the world’s often haphazard lurch toward justice.”—Mark Doty, National Book Award winner