What a marvel!
I was digging through a bookshop in Sackville and came across a book of poetry called Burning The Empty Nests. I cracked it open and the first poem I read went like this:
Making Beasts
When I was about ten
I glued together an old
white turtle skull,
a woodchuck's skull,
and a red squirrel's tail
to make my first
mythical beast.
What has been created
is never lost. It crawls
up through my thoughts now
on the feet I never gave it.
Needless to say, I bought this book. And the poems, each and every one, changes the way I read poems. Their perspective and approach are so bright. The book doesn't say anything about Gregory Orr, it's author, so I did some research. He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse. Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to amphetamines.He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Naturally, this lead me to research Trisha Orr. As it turned out, she is a talent unto herself. Seeing as this blog is for poetry, music, and painting, this marriage of talents hits on two cylinders. Here are a few of Trisha Orr's paintings and a few more of Gregory Orr's poems from Burning The Empty Nests. He has nine other collections that I will eagerly hunt out for myself.
Darkness surrounds the dead tree. Gathering around it,
we set a torch to the trunk.
High in the branches sits an old man
made of wax. He wears a garland of wounds;
each one glows like a white leaf with its own light.
Flames rise toward him, and as they touch his feet
he explodes, scattering insects made of black glass.
A moth lands on the toe of my boot.
Picking it up, I discover a map on its wings.
The Wooden Dancer
She wears a necklace of light.
Each bead is a deserted room
you enter: bare light bulb, a white
glove on a table. You walk to the window
and stare out at the snowfields.
A flock of sparrows is eating your footprints.
A Stone's Poem of Pain
In the dark hollow between your lungs, an apple
is growing; a white apple the size of her breasts,
but no one can see it. Only you
feel it pressing out against your ribs,
but the pain is distant, hovers over you
like your mother's hand about to strike.
