This primer guides young poets towards a deeper understanding of how poetry can function in their lives, while introducing the art in an exciting new way. It provides writing exercises and explains topics such as the personal and cultural threshold, the four forces that animate poetic language, tactics of revision, ecstasy and engagement as motives for poetry, and how to locate and learn from our personal poetic forebears.

From the acclaimed American poet whose work the San Francisco Review called mystical, carnal, reflective, wry come three gorgeous poetic sequences. In the first, Eden and After, Gregory Orr retells the story of Adam and Eve. The second sequence, The City of Poetry, evokes and explores a visionary metropolis where every poem is a house, and every house a poem. The final sequence, River Inside the River, focuses on redemption through the mysterious power of language to resurrect the beloved and recover what is lost. River Inside the River combines Orr s characteristic spirituality and meditative lyricism with storytelling and myth-making. These are poems that will sustain, console, and give hope, from a poet at the height of his powers."

In this moving, playful and deeply philosophical volume, Gregory Orr seeks innovative ways for the imagination to respond to and create meaning out of painful experiences, while at the same time rejoicing in love and language. A passionate exploration of the forces that shape us, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write explores themes of survival and the powerlessness of the self in a chaotic and unfair world, finding hope in the emotions and vitality of poetry. With characteristic meditative lyricism, the poet reflects on grief and the power of language in extended odes ("Ode to Nothing", "Ode to Words") and slips effortlessly from personal trauma ("Song of What Happens") to public catastrophe ("Charlottesville Elegy"). The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write confirms Orr's place among the preeminent lyric poets of his generation, engaging the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humour and transforming them into celebratory song.

In this moving, playful, and deeply philosophical volume, Gregory Orr seeks innovative ways for the imagination to respond to and create meaning out of painful experiences, while at the same time rejoicing in love and language. A passionate exploration of the forces that shape us, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write explores themes of survival and the powerlessness of the self in a chaotic and unfair world, finding hope in the emotions and vitality of poetry. With characteristic meditative lyricism, the poet reflects on grief and the power of language in extended odes ("Ode to Nothing," "Ode to Words") and slips effortlessly from personal trauma ("Song of What Happens") to public catastrophe ("Charlottesville Elegy"). The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write confirms Orr's place among the preeminent lyric poets of his generation, engaging the deepest existential issues with wisdom and humor and transforming them into celebratory song.

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

This book-length sequence of ecstatic, visionary lyrics recalls Rumi in its search for the beloved and its passionate belief in the healing qualities of art and beauty.

"Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved" is an incantatory celebration of the "Book," an imaginary and self-gathering anthology of all the lyrics--both poems and songs--ever written. Each poem highlights a distinct aspect of the human condition, and together the poems explore love, loss, restoration, the beauty of the world, the beauty of the beloved, and the mystery of poetry. The purpose and power of the Book is to help us live by reconnecting us to the world and to our emotional lives.

"I put the beloved
In a wooden coffin.
The fire ate his body;
The flames devoured her.
I put the beloved
In a poem or song.
Tucked it between
Two pages of the Book.
How bright the flames.
All of me burning,
All of me on fire
And still whole."

There is nothing quite like this book--an "active anthology" in the best sense--where individuals find the poems and songs that will sustain them. Or the poems find them.

Gregory Orr is the author of eight books of poetry, four volumes of criticism, and a memoir. He has received numerous awards for his work, most recently the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Orr has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975 and was, for many years, the poetry editor of "The Virginia Quarterly Review." He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia.

City of Salt, Gregory Orr's sixth book of poems, is largely autobiographical and presents moments of intense emotion which are anchored in clearly dramatized events. These are poems of elegy and celebration, and of occasions where the two modes fuse in acts of redemptive imagination.

Hailed on its original publication as "eloquent testimony to the engaging power of art in a man's life" (Washington Post), this deeply moving memoir, long out of print, is reissued with an illuminating new afterword. When acclaimed poet Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. From the immediate aftermath-a period of shock, sadness, and isolation-it quickly became clear that support and guidance would not be coming from his distant mother. Nor would it come from his father, a philandering country doctor addicted to amphetamines. Left to his own devices, the boy suffered. Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. As a young man, his feelings and a growing sense of idealism prompted him to activism in the civil rights movement, where he marched and was imprisoned, and then scarred again by a terrifying abduction. Eventually, Orr's experiences led him to understand that art, particularly poetry, could work as a powerful source of healing and meaning to combat the trauma he carried. Throughout The Blessing, Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art.

" A] confident, mystical, expansive project."--"Publishers Weekly"

" D]azzling and timeless . . . focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent--not God, but the beloved--that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time."--"The Virginia Quarterly Review," "Editor's Choice"

"Mary Oliver calls him '...a Walt Whitman without an inch of Whitman's bunting or oratory.' In these pages, he is more nearly a modern-day Rumi. This is not primarily a poetry of image, but of ideas, perfectly distilled. Orr brings together the monumental themes of love and loss in small, spare, and exquisite koan-like poems.""--ForeWord"

..".magnetic poems that open the world of lyrical verse to the larger questions of what is true and timeless."
--"The Bloomsbury Review"

Gregory Orr continues his acclaimed project on the "beloved" with a lyrical sequence about the joys and hungers of being fully engaged in life. Through concise, perfectly formed poems, he wakes us to the ecstatic possibilities of recognizing and risking love. Mary Oliver has called this project "gorgeous," and said that he "speaks of the events that have no larger or more important rival in our lives--of our love and our loving."

"If to say it once"
"And once only, then still"
"To say: Yes."

"And say it complete, "
"Say it as if the word"
"Filled the whole moment"
"With its absolute saying."

"Later for "but," "
"Later for "if.""

"Now"
"Only the single syllable"
"That is the beloved."
"That is the world."

Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.

Orr explores the biographical sources of Kunitz's work, the strategies by which he achieves his aim of converting life into legend, and the theory and tactic of the dramatic lyric, the poetic form Kunitz has practiced and perfected over the course of a lifetime.

How lyric poetry transforms frauma; 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.

From the acclaimed American poet whose work the San Francisco Review called "mystical, carnal, reflective, wry" come three gorgeous poetic sequences. In the first, "Eden and After," Gregory Orr retells the story of Adam and Eve. The second sequence, "The City of Poetry," evokes and explores a visionary metropolis where "every poem is a house, and every house a poem." The final sequence, "River Inside the River," focuses on redemption through the mysterious power of language to resurrect the beloved and recover what is lost. River Inside the River combines Orr's characteristic spirituality and meditative lyricism with storytelling and myth-making. These are poems that will sustain, console, and give hope, from a poet at the height of his powers.