Soul Make a Path Through Shouting »

Cyrus Cassells, author of four books of poetry, is a graduate of Stanford University and 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.

Soul Make a Path Through Shouting is Cyrus Cassells' second book. His first, The Mud Actor, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Al Young in 1982. Enriched both mythologically and experientially by world travels, Cassells makes the vital journey inward, a search for spiritual grace among "hen feathers, rubble, shards of broken dolls" in Afghanistan or among the vantage-points of the Pyrenees. He draws with equal ease from classical Greek mythology and experientially by his world travels, oral traditions, and others, and the result is an often hypnotic and rhapsodic interweaving of dramatic narratives forming a single whole. He celebrates the dignity and courage of a girl on her way to school in 1957, knowing as only an authentic poet can, that this is the real history, the real and necessary song of a world. Soul Make a Path Through Shouting is a virtuoso performance.

Publishers Weekly

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.)