Book Description

"The heart of Orr's poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry."-San Francisco Review

Customer Reviews (4)

the very best poetry...and more
I most appreciate poetry that is accompaniment, poetry that leaves me knowing that I'm in intimately shared territory.We're not often encouraged to think of poetry that way.Poets, teachers and students of poetry are apt to think about poems (and collections of poems) in terms of poetic prowess, academic discipline or literary analysis. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but skill and intellectual examinations and appreciations by themselves won't keep me returning to a book almost daily, over a period of years. I want something more. This book continues to bring me the pleasures and consolations of accompaniment, the rigors of provocation, and inspiration to re-think/re-envision the capacities of The Poem/The Word/The World, and our capacities to experience them. I FEEL these poems--as a pulse, as a heartbeat.They are like filaments that bridge the gaps between body and psyche and soul.

Among many other things, CONCERNING THE BOOK THAT IS THE BODY OF THE BELOVED is a daring spiritual undertaking, a meditation, an expression of gratitude, an examination of life process and poetic process and the relationships between the two.The language of these poems is deceptively simple, their premises infinitely complex. My copy of this book opens familiarly to two pages, so I seem to start each day with one or the other:

The world comes into the poem,
The poem comes into the world.
Reciprocity--it all comes down
To that.
As with lovers:
When it's right you can't say
Who is kissing whom.

and from the other: ...
Was there anything
More wonderful?

How long did it last?
Maybe only a moment;
Maybe it was a dream.
We were afraid
To feel such joy.

(stanza break)


Still, it changed us,
And for once we knew
We belonged in the world.

If I had to leave my house in a hurry, had time to grab only one book, this would be it.

Wisdom Literature
Orr's new collection is a timeless long poem that reads like wisdom literature and Eastern poetry, and will endure, as they have. This is one of the greatest (in the true sense of the word) poems of this decade, perhaps of the first half of this century. It speaks universally, as truly great poetry must; my father, at whom I've thrown countless poems with little reaction on his part, immediately ordered his own copy of this book after reading mine -- the first book of poetry he has ever owned.

A Poetry For All
Concerning is a book that speaks to the mind and to the heart. It has a doublefold language that both the mind and heart can understand. And in reading, I can hear my heart and mind connect. So odd, because they speak in different languages with only a few shared words and phrases. And I think my mind/brain attaches to Concerning through the written "language" on the page. The brain follows the words, syntax, presentation, logic of each of the poems. But the book is too large for the mind to hold it all. The mind starts swirling in all the subtleties of emotion and contraries within the emotions. The mind gets lost after awhile, but accepts.

The heart, however, embraces. It understands. It knows. It doesn't get lost. It knows from from the tone. It understands why each poem weeps and smiles at the same time, or is that the soul?

The book is full and full for the person reading it. The book explains poetry, why poetry, and what is poetry. How poetry is an inherent necessity/urge, how it is natural. How each poem tells the same story -- because each person feels grief, love, joy, and anguish -- but each person is unique with their greif, love, joy, and anguish, and so each poem is unique. But this book somehow embraces all the shared emotions we have and talks to all of us and we back to it naturally.

The only failing of this book is that not everyone will read it. If they did, I believe everyone would appreciate it and poetry, read more poetry, and know what poetry/life/death/living/lovingare and are about.

I think this is the most important book of original poems written in the 2000s, and if not, it is for me.

powerful, wise, moving book
It is rare when a recognized poet, at the very height
of his talent, gives up the maneuvers and troupes that
gained him success, turns away--to begin something
completely new. "It is myself that I revise," Yeats
wrote. And in this powerful new collection, Gregory
Orr does just that. "Concerning the Book that Is the
Body of the Beloved" is a 200 page long spiritual
mediation of epic proportion, described as "an
incantatory celebration of the Book, an imaginary and
self-gathering anthology of all the lyrics-both poems
and songs-ever written." The description is apt, but
somewhat limiting. For in addition to its imaginary
epic ambition to be "an anthology gathered / since the
beginning of time, / gathering itself" the book also
serves as an ars poetica, a declaration of this poet's
intent to be open ("the poem didn't express / emotion,
it was emotion") in giving the voice ("to give form /
to her love and grief") to the deceased, and in doing
so to find his voice's origin. Orr's philosophy
touches upon the limitation of human reach ("unable to
touch / the body of the beloved because / inches of it
cover your skin"), uttering ("do words outlast / the
world / they describe?") and vision ("too many
mysteries... Why don't we stop") to propose the feeling
as the key to our understanding of our being here ("to
see the beloved, / to be seen by the beloved: / that's
where being starts"). His philosophy is very
skillfully grounded by the intimate details of this
world: "When my kids look for me I hope / they can
find min in the house, / or reach me by phone. // When
that won't work, / I hope they can find me in... the
poem or song someone wrote / or one of my own." This
grounding of the subliminal is very effective as the
collection proceeds to offer elegies to Orr's brother,
love poems to his wife, and moving invocations of
authors of various times, from Sapho to Apollinaire.
Observing his own time, Orr also serves an angry
indictment of the stagnation taking place in today's
literary arena, of writers who are "half-asleep" in
their work, who "could care less". For Orr cares. The
passion ("to feel, to feel, to feel") is evident.
Orr invests an enormous amount of emotional energy
("for me, my brother / ...the first departure / that
tore my heart") in the brief, spare lyrics. That is,
perhaps, what makes the book work so well: the volume
of Orr's voice can be loud or quiet, a whisper or an
incantation, but it is always emotionally charged,
always appealing to the reader's senses. It is by the
way of the heart that his wisdom comes: "You might
think the things I say / are too simple for words, /
too embarrassing to be spoken. // But if I repeat the
obvious, / where's the harm in that? // May be it was
always simple: / loss surrounds us".
The book's larger frame is the imaginary spiritual
text of "a self gathering of poems" that bear witness
to the world in which they are written, providing the
key to that world. This clear but quite ambitious
structure is balanced by Orr's skill as a poet. For
instance, he can be very musical: "Scar they stare at.
/ Scar they're scared of...a brightness that frightens."
He can also show how directness can reflect one's
inner turmoil, achieving insight: "A few things you
might want to know: / I am not an idiot. / I am not a
mystic. I've read / poems since before most people /
on the planet were born. / Read them and written them,
too. All the time believing they helped / me to live.
I was right. But / I was also wrong. /...Loss seemed to
me / the most of it. I believed in love / but I
thought its name was loss. / And worse: when I said
"life" / I meant "death." When I said "death" / I have
no idea what I meant."
What is most astonishing for me about "Concerning the Book
that is the Body of the Beloved" is that is
constitutes a book-long spiritual undertaking that's
also-unlike most projects of this sort--is very good
and readable poetry. Orr's charged and emotional lyric
reminds of Song of Songs' musical tide ("The world
comes into the poem./The poem comes into the
world./...As with lovers:/When it's right you can't
say/who is kissing whom") as well as the plain-spoken
intensity of Rumi. The composition of his collection
as a whole, however, and the thinking behind it, are
quite complex--in a way Edmond Jabes's work is a
complex tapestry ("I read the book for years / and
never understood a word") where the meaning is given
for a moment, and then taken away; but the
understanding remains. It is a wonderful, moving book. I recommend it highly.
--Ilya Kaminsky

... Read more

Book Description
Intended for general readers and for students and scholars of poetry, Poetry as Survival is a complex and lucid analysis of the powerful role poetry can play in confronting, surviving, and transcending pain and suffering. Gregory Orr draws from a generous array of sources. He weaves discussions of work by Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman with quotes from three-thousand-year-old Egyptian poems, Inuit songs, and Japanese love poems to show that writing personal lyric has helped poets throughout history to process emotional and experiential turmoil, from individual stress to collective grief. More specifically, he considers how the acts of writing, reading, and listening to lyric bring ordering powers to the chaos that surrounds us. Moving into more contemporary work, Orr looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, and Theodore Roethke, poets who relied on their own work to get through painful psychological experiences. As a poet who has experienced considerable trauma--especially as a child--Orr refers to the damaging experiences of his past and to the role poetry played in his ability to recover and survive. His personal narrative makes all the more poignant and vivid Orr's claims for lyric poetry's power as a tool for healing. Poetry as Survival is a memorable and inspiring introduction to lyric poetry's capacity to help us find safety and comfort in a threatening world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Worth Its Weight in Gold
This book is worth its weight in gold.It is worth more than all the self-help-how-to-write-poetry books put together.

Orr writes of the poetry of survival with complete authority.He knows what he's talking about, having suffered a psychic wound early in childhood when he accidentally killed his little brother in a hunting accident.Orr writes:"To say that I was horrified and traumatized by the event is only to state the obvious."The point, says Orr, is that his writing got him beyond the horror and the paralysis.

What sets this book apart from the "how-to's" and the "can-do's" is Orr's emphasis on excellence: In other words, it isn't enough to have a psychic wound and to write about it--great writing comes about only through a careful and (usually) long apprenticeship.

The first half of the book explains the psychology of writing and healing.Orr's writing is thoughtful and engaging.He has the ability to explain complex concepts in a way that is easy for the reader to understand.For instance, in explaining the "self," Orr writes:"The self, in my image, is like a tiny island in a vast sea of chaos, and it's also like those conch shells you lift to your ear to hear the ocean's roar:the chaos of the sea is inside the self also."Throughout, Orr seeks to explain how writing can give order to the seemingly chaotic life.

The second half of the book deals with writers of the personal lyric, focusing on early practitioners like Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman.In addition, in his thoroughly engaging way, Orr writes of several poets as being his "heroes."In doing so, amazingly, he humanizes them, makes them real people rather than the marble statues they seem to be in poetry anthologies.Other poets he discusses are:Plath, Roethke, Dickinson, Keats, and Wilfred Owen.

One of my favorite revelations in the book was Orr's brief discussion of the Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz, whose "In the Middle of Life" portrays, in Orr's words, "a shell-shocked, traumatized veteran who must relearn everything from scratch and through elementary incantatory repetitions."

As a university lecturer, and as someone who is familiar with literary criticism, I find that often in classrooms the writer's original and personal motivations for writing are erased from consideration.Works are often come to as though they are cadavers, opened and probed objectively on a slab.Orr, in contrast, brings poets and their poems fully alive.The experience of reading this book was thoroughly rewarding.

I highly recommend this book.It is a great companion to DeSalvo's WRITING AS A WAY OF HEALING:HOW TELLING OUR STORIES TRANSFORMS OUR LIVES. ... Read more

Book Description
How can I celebrate love/ now that I know what it does? So begins this booklength lyric sequence which reinhabits and modernizes the story of Orpheus, the mythic master of the lyre (and father of lyric poetry) and Eurydice, his lover who died and whom Orpheus tried to rescue from Hades.

Gregory Orr uses as his touchstone the assertion that myths attempt to narrate a whole human experience, while at the same time serving a purpose which resists explanation. Through poems of passionate and obsessive erotic love, Orr has dramatized the anguished intersection of infinite longings and finite lives and, in the process, explores the very sources of poetry.

When Eurydice saw him
huddled in a thick cloak,
she should have known
he was alive,
the way he shivered
beneath its useless folds.

But what she saw
was the usual: a stranger
confused in a new world.
And when she touched him
on the shoulder,
it was nothing
personal, a kindness
he misunderstood.
To guide someone
through the halls of hell
is not the same as love.

"A reader unfamiliar with Orr's work may be surprised, at first, by the richness of both action and visual detail that his succinct, spare poems convey. Lyricism can erupt in the midst of desolation."-Boston Globe

When Gregory Orr's Burning the Empty Nest appear, Publisher's Weekly praised it as an "auspicious debut for a gifted newcomer…he already demonstrates a superior control of his medium." Kirkus Review celebrated it as "an almost unbearably powerful first book of poetry" and enthusiastically reviewed his second book Gathering the Bones Together, noting that "Orr's power is the eloquence of understatement." Most recently, his City of Salt was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Gregory Orr teaches at the University of Virginia. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A student's praise
Orr is currently my poetry instructor, and he read a few of these poems in my Classical Literature classes here at UVA. I might add that his hushed, musical way of reading the poems makes these lyrics even more transcendent than they already are. I have to say that this book is one of the most honed, compelling and moving collection of lyrics written on the violent, transforming nature of romantic love I have ever read. Yes, the Orpheus myth has been attempted by many of our major poets, but Orr approaches the story with such a clear-eyed and fresh approach, telling us in his quiet, rhythmic meditations the sharpness of heartbreak, the fragility of earthly love, the madness of O's lonely wandering. The Orpheus and Eurydice story becomes a metaphor for intense, unhinged love that transforms lovers into gods and goddesses, the kind of love that sends the madman-lover careening through both heaven and hell. Orr is a master of the lyric, and after reading this book I could not believe I was so lucky to be his student.

Average Poetry
I was very disapointed in this book. However, that disapointment is not necessarily the author's fault, but my own. I wanted to learn something new about Orpheus & Eurydice. Instead, I got a short, padded, overpriced book of average poetry, with no background information or any sort of explanation of the subject. Those who are looking for romantic poetry may get something out of this, but my copy went directly to the recycle box.

Doing Justice to the Myth
What I want with each retelling, whether it be a nursery rhyme or one of my grandfather's war stories, is something fresh and different. I love, of course, rereading my favorite books and poems, but with a tale like that of Orpheus and Eurydice, I'm simply not looking for the same story. I want a new perspective, not only a retelling, but a reshaping of the myth. Orr puts his own spirit into what many of you may know of as the tragic lives of the two lovers. He writes, however, from a place unlike most before him. With the same joy as seeing a film remade with exceptional talent, I read Orr's work with excitement and pleasure. It's not the same story. It's much more. ... Read more

Book Description

Gregory Orr's genius is the transformation of trauma into art. Whether writing about his responsibility for a brother's death during a hunting accident, drug addiction, or being jailed during the Civil Rights struggle, lyricism erupts in the midst of desolation and violence. Orr's spare, succinct poems distill myth from the domestic and display a richness of action and visual detail.

This long-awaited collection is soulful work from a remarkable poet, whose poems have been described as "mystical, carnal, reflective, and wry." (San Francisco Review)

"Love Poem"

A black biplane crashes through the window
of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down,
removing his leather hood.
He hands me my grandmother's jade ring.
No, it is two robin's eggs and
a telephone number: yours.

from "Gathering the Bones Together"

A father and his four sons
run down a slope toward
a deer they just killed.
the father and two sons carry
rifles. They laugh, jostle,
and chatter together.
A gun goes off
and the youngest brother
falls to the ground.
A boy with a rifle
stands beside him,
screaming…

"Orr's is an immaculate style of latent violence and inhibited tenderness, charged with a desperate intensity whose source is often obscure."-The New York Times Book Review

Gregory Orr is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three books of criticism. He is the editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, teaches at the University of Virginia, and lives with his wife and daughters in Charlottesville. In 2002, along with his selected poems The Caged Owl, he will also publish a memoir and a book about poetry writing: Three Strange Angels: Trauma and Transformation in Lyric Poetry.

Also Available by Gregory Orr:
Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence
TP $12.00, 1-55659-151-9 CUSA

Customer Reviews (2)

Devestating and Beautiful
Orr's collection here covers his entire body of work, from the brilliant Burning the Empty Nests to more recent, unpublished work, in an edition that is top notch in every way.Check out Orr's nonfiction writing as well: both The Blessing and Poetry as Survival are must-reads for those interested in the artistic process and the significant meaning that poetry can have in our daily lives.Stunning.

smoke and mirrors
there are so many better poets out there-- Sharon Olds for example ... Read more

Book Description
Critically acclaimed poet Gregory Orr's memoir of his tragic boyhood and ultimate redemption

Filled with the spare and moving language that marks Gregory Orr's most affecting poems, The Blessing explores themes of personal tragedy and atonement, trauma and reconciliation. Orr's ability to give voice to the feelings that are hardest to put into words makes his story unforgettable, mesmerizing reading.

The blood that would first stain Orr's childhood was spilled the year he was twelve. In that autumn, Gregory Orr shot his brother to death in a hunting accident. In this spare and poignant memoir, he tells how this horrific event shaped his life. Against backdrops of the rural Hudson Valley, a remote charity hospital in the jungles of Haiti, and the Deep South of the civil rights era where he marched and bled with other youthful demonstrators, Orr articulates his journey in a language as sharp-edged and authentic as the experiences themselves.

At his brother's funeral, he saw ". . . that death was with us. It was the small white snail of wadded Kleenex my mother kept pressing against her face; it was nibbling holes in her cheek as if it were a leaf." No comfort would come from Orr's beloved though distant mother or his father, a quixotic country doctor addicted to amphetamines. He would have to make sense of life's inchoate forces on his own. Eventually, his experiences would lead him to an unexpected epiphany and a clear answer to one of life's basic questions: How do we find meaning in the face of death? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Peace through poetry
This book is shocking in its stark retelling of an emotionally brutal childhood. I was drawn in instantly. I found myself holding my breath and staring into the room at the conclusion of a page. I was stunned. The moments of the story have lingered with me. My mind poured over the events. Later even after I had moved on to other thoughts, the emotions lingered under my thoughts, so that I would often pause in the middle of doing tasks. The writer seems to be seeking peace through resurrection and forgiveness.

Peace After
This book is shocking in its stark retelling of an emotionally brutal childhood.I was drawn in instantly.I found myself holding my breath and staring into the room at the conclusion of a page.I was stunned.The moments of the story have lingered with me.My mind poured over the events.Later even after I had moved on to other thoughts, the emotions lingered under my thoughts, so that I would often pause in the middle of doing tasks.The writer seems to be seeking peace through resurrection and forgiveness.

Powerful
Orr's book is an amazing chronicle of his early years, and an essential window into how art - in this case poetry - can play an important role in survival and transformation.The writing is clear and forceful. Highly recommended for anyone interested in memoir. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (2)

City of Salt: A Work of Simplistic Art
Gregory Orr uses a style that is very straight-forward. The poems have a very serious tone. Most of the poems are not very funny.There is usually a point to each poem that is conveyed strongly throughout the poem. A Litany is one poem that has a message that is echoed throughout the poem. The speaker, who is a boy, in the poem shoots his brother. There are a lot of solemn and sad things that go along in the poem that echo the fact the speaker shot his brother. The speaker runs off into his room and the reader does not even know what the speaker did. It is all suspenseful and then about halfway into the poem, the speaker says that he just shot his brother. This is an excellent form of using poems for suspense as the reader is left wondering what happened.
In My Father's Voice, Orr is to the point and leaves really nothing to the imagination in what he did not put in. In the poem, the father screamed at his daughter. It is shown well as the daughter braces herself for the screaming from the father. The daughter's face goes blank and the imagery of the father screaming at the girl is conveyed well. There is no extra lines that are not needed in this poem. It is a nine line poem that gets its point across very quickly and stays on task.
Three Small Songs is another poem that conveys Orr's straight-forward style and his clearly stated points. The first two stanzas are about life and how humans do not live long. It is shown in eight lines very beautifully with the last two lines ending,
we're here
and then we're gone.

The next stanza is about when a mother cries so will the child. It is a very short five lines that tells the reader about a child trying not to cry when the mother is crying. The next stanza is about the speaker as a child lying on the ground at dusk. The stanza shows a child's youthfulness by showing a child just lying on the ground at dusk. A very quick and to the point five lines, Orr's stanzas all mesh together.
Orr's style works very well. He does not dance around the point and has a very serious tone to his poems. His poems are also very calculating with each line seemingly placed in with great precision. City of Salt is a great read. Nothing is left to question after reading his work. His poems give the answers to every question that could arise in his work.

Greg Orr's masterpiece
Gregory Orr opens his book of poems with the five lined poem, "Origin of the Marble forest" which is a masterfully created poem about childhood. This first poem captures a moment of childhood nostalgia with piercing precision, and accomplishes this in only five lines. The first poem is only the tip of the ice berg when it comes to Orr's unique style of poetry. The book has a somewhat grim feeling to it and can be chewy at times, but underneath all of the poems there is hope and closure. Orr touches a lot on his mother and brother's death, but even though this subject is touched on multiple times, Orr is able to keep all the poems new and fresh to the reader. This is where Orr really shines, it his ability to touch on subjects of the same attitude, yet he is able to introduce new ideas and perspectives with each poem. One of the best crafted poems in the book is "I found a Bird", in this piece Orr touches on his questioning of self worth in alternating point of views between him and his daughter, the poem is broken into short excerpts, the most moving of which are the lines where he uses his daughter as an inspiration. The poem reads, "I found a bird. / It is night./ I am small./ I am happy now./ the lamp is lit." the serenity and beauty that Orr is able to capture and a few lines of poetry seems to be one of his greatest talents, he showcases this further in "three small songs" and "elegy" in which the poems are broken up into short excerpts that have the power and serenity of a silent freight train. I would highly recommend reading Gregory Orr's "The City of Salt" he uses a dark tone in most of his work, yet has a bright undertone that keeps all the poems fresh to the reader and keeps the reader moving from one poem to the next. The only drawback to the book would be Orr tendency to go back to his brothers death, in which Orr accidentally killed his brother in a hunting accident, this may bother some readers if they are looking for something new and exciting in each poem, I myself was more than happy to venture further into Orr's struggle with the death of his brother, and the fact the Orr kept each experience fresh helped greatly. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Gregory Orr, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1590 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Customer Reviews (1)

magical
Gregory Orr is an incredible writer capable of making impossible imagesseem like they are your own memory.He is too little known for such a talent.Easily my favorite book of poetry. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Incantations
Gregory Orr is unreal.Every poem in this collection, whether concerning the poet's complicated youth, or merely describing a lake, takes off in a frenzy of pyrotechnical magic that is both comprehensible and awe inspiring.

I do not think there is a single poet out there today who has Orr's talent and who is also so eager to give interviews, expound on poetry without pretentiousness, and give otherwise lost young poets a roadmap to go by.And if you've ever read anything about him, you'll know how far he's come and how much he's worked through.This and his latest in "Rattle" are highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
Bi-monthly literary news magazine Includes appreciation and last interview with Kenneth Kochand cover story on Sandra Cisneros with contributions by Philip Whalen,Gregory Orr and profile of Elizabeth Evans ... Read more