Cyrus Cassells

Cyrus Cassells Poems

Cyrus Cassells Biography

Poet and translator Cyrus Cassells was born in 1957 in Delaware and earned a BA from Stanford University. Cassells is the author of a number of collections of poetry, including the National Poetry Series winning The Mud Actor (1982), Soul Make a Path through Shouting (1994), which won the William Carlos Williams Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Beautiful Signor (1997), which won a Lambda Literary Award, More Than Peace and Cypresses (2004), and The Crossed-Out Swastika (2012). A book of his translations of the Catalan poet Francesc Parcerisas, Still Life With Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, is forthcoming. Awarded the National Poetry Series when he was just 23, Cassells’s poetry is cosmopolitan in spirit, examining the influence of history, place, and memory on identity. As he told Contemporary Authors: “My poetry is deeply rooted in my world travels and spiritual questing; it is characteristically panoramic, multicultural, and internationalist in spirit. I consider myself an African-American seeker, ambassador, and citizen of the world.” Cassells’s book The Crossed-Out Swastika tells the stories of both fictional and real-life young Europeans caught in the violence and terror of World War II. His highly acclaimed second book, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, also treats world historical events through the lens of individual experience. Speaking to the Texas State University magazine, Cassells admitted: “I only slowly evolved the work that became Soul Make a Path Through Shouting… It is a cycle of poems concerned with spiritual endurance set in several different places in the world, including war-torn Afghanistan, Central and Latin America, Catalonia, Soviet Russia, Italy and America during the civil rights movement and the AIDS crisis. This was a very serious project for a young poet, and I revised it many, many times in order to do justice to the testimony that came to me from several different survivors of war, illness and persecution. I wondered at points if I was up to the task of conveying these intense experiences in poetry. It was a very, very difficult process. I had to decide for myself if I was really a poet.” Cassells has received a Lannan Literary Award, two NEA grants, and a Pushcart Prize. He is professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos and has served on the faculty of Cave Canem. He divides his time between Austin, New York City, and Paris, and works on occasion in Barcelona as a translator of Catalan poetry.)

The Best Poem Of Cyrus Cassells

Beautiful Signor

All dreams of the soul
End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.

—Yeats, "The Phases of the Moon"


Whenever we wake,
still joined, enraptured—
at the window,
each clear night's finish
the black pulse of dominoes
dropping to land;

whenever we embrace,
haunted, upwelling,
I know
a reunion is taking place—

Hear me when I say
our love's not meant to be
an opiate;
helpmate,
you are the reachable mirror
that dares me to risk
the caravan back
to the apogee, the longed-for
arms of the Beloved—


Dusks of paperwhites,
dusks of jasmine,
intimate beyond belief

beautiful Signor

no dread of nakedness

beautiful Signor

my long ship,
my opulence,
my garland

beautiful Signor

extinguishing the beggar's tin,
the wind of longing

beautiful Signor

laving the ruined country,
the heart wedded to war

beautiful Signor

the kiln-blaze
in my body,
the turning heaven

beautiful Signor

you cover me with pollen

beautiful Signor

into your sweet mouth—

This is the taproot:
against all strictures,
desecrations,
I'll never renounce,
never relinquish
the first radiance, the first
moment you took my hand—

This is the endless wanderlust:
dervish,
yours is the April-upon-April love
that kept me spinning even beyond
your eventful arms
toward the unsurpassed:

the one vast claiming heart,
the glimmering,
the beautiful and revealed Signor.

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