The Cave of Hypnos: Early Poems
Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
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:
- Mnemosyne
- Tide
- Karma
- The Salt Stone
- Panikon Deima
- White Rooms
- How and Why
- Come to Me
- The Dancers
- Last Laugh of the Rainbow Dancer
- Elysium
- Confession
- Dukkha
- The Gulls
- The Answer
- The News From Saigon
- Gypsy
- Job
- The Bed
- The Bureaucrats
- Bedlam
- Ice
- The Voyeur
- The Yellow Brick Road
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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.