River Inside the River by Gregory Orr

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 -

THECAGED OWL: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, POETRY AS SURVIVAL, AND THE BLESSING

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.