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.

"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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.