Digital Scholarship

The Cave of Hypnos: Early Poems

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

cover

The Cave of Hypnos: Early Poems is a chapbook of poems from the early 1970s that includes several poems that won a Wallace Stevens Poetry Award in 1973. Drawing on themes from Buddhism and Greek mythology, these brief poems celebrate the flesh, while probing its brevity and suffering. The chapbook is also available as a PDF file.

The Seattle Star picked The Cave of Hypnos: Early Poems as a weekly e-book and said this about it:

I'm a big fan of the balance of simplicity and complexity in these poems. They clearly reflect another time in poetry when the influence of Wallace Stevens was still strong yet they are closer to James Wright or H.D. than they are to Stevens: still deeply attached to myth but as a matter of fact rather than an exotic evocation. . . .

The poems and the book are short enough that one can easily sample them at leisure. We recommend you do.

Here's an example poem:

Mnemosyne

Men dream into flesh
between long nights,
weaving their breath
into memory,
and believing
that memory
mirrors the world,
as if men's names
were not just water
singing softly
to be heard.

The chapbook includes the following poems:

Citation

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., The Cave of Hypnos: Early Poems. (Houston: Digital Scholarship, 2012), http://digital-scholarship.org/poems/cave-of-hypnos.htm..

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. The Cave of Hypnos: Early Poems. Houston: Digital Scholarship, 2012. http://digital-scholarship.org/poems/cave-of-hypnos.htm.

Copyright © 2012 by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

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