I’ve
found another poet and fallen in love with his words. “You didn’t know about Gregory Orr?” you ask
in astonishment. I hang my head. No, I didn’t.
It’s not all spun sugar and gossamer
p.
69
What’s
in a poem? Everything in life and the
human heart including “deepest grief and
even horror.”
The
problem for me in talking about a collection of poems like this is that my
brain feels like it has moved into images and feelings. It’s difficult to convey. I want to simply read you the poems I read
and say, “See? Isn’t that wonderful?” Alas, I cannot in a blog so I will try to
explain what I loved about this collection.
As
with many collections of poetry, so much is conveyed in such a short volume,
only 124 pages, and with only the utterly necessary words. There are not even titles for the individual
poems in the second and third sections, just titles for the three sections of
the book and within the first section. I
have heard it said that musicians play notes but great musicians play the
silence between the notes as well. Here,
there is lots of space and silence to help shape the poems.
In
the section titled Eden and After,
Orr reimagines Genesis, in poetic form.
To
Choose
God planned a static planet
With plants that bore
No offspring - as if
Acts had no consequence.
p.
27
This
created different layers of confusion for my mind. Was it presumptuous or imaginative to put
words in God’s mouth and thoughts in his head?
Does he even have or need those things?
Since God is not a human, is it anthropomorphizing him?
Eve’s
feelings on exploring the world she now inhabits are revealed in two poems –
To
Go
Who wouldn’t be alarmed
To see the tulip’s
Fleshy petals
Wilt and fall?
… How it was definitive,
Beyond recall.
p.
32
To
Say/To Save
As she spoke aloud
Each flower’s name
She felt her saying save
p.
46
I’ve
been exploring the idea from Joseph Campbell that the infinite is here and now,
that if each moment is being, has been and will always have been, then
recognizing fixes it in memory and makes it infinite. I felt like this last poem caught that idea.
The
section titled The City of Poetry is
the type of poetry I find more comfortable - more words, images and thoughts, though still spare.
I
read page 56 to 57 about the three main difficult passages in his life and how
a book of Keats helped Orr get through the third. I wondered if this was a personal
recollection or a character he had created so I went searching and found the
following article. (Yes, he did kill his
younger brother in a hunting accident when he was twelve and his mother did die
two years later and he was abducted
and imprisoned in rural Alabama during the sixties.) You can read more about Gregory Orr’s poetry and
life here -
Impermanence
is celebrated in the section titled River
Inside the River
Even the things that seem to stand still
Flow slowly into other forms.
p.
93
Comparing
a cat to a love-sponge and a dog as a fountain of love seems so apt to me in
the poem on page 99. I love the fluidity
of using he and she for the same character/person “the beloved.” I find that fascinating and I wonder what he
meant by it. It makes me think of how I
sometimes imagine God to be either/neither male or female.
And
at last, he made me cry on page 111.
First, there was shatter.
Then, aftermath.
Only later and only slowly
We gathered words
Against our loss.
But last was not least,
Last was not least of these.
This
book was a wonderful experience. I hope
you take it.
