Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr Reviewed by Ted Genoways
The Virginia Quarterly Review
"Gregory Orr's new book is dazzling and timeless. Sure, the trappings of modern life appear at the edges of these poems, but their focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent ? not God, but the beloved ? that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time. It's an experience usually reserved for reading the ancients, and clearly that was partly Orr's inspiration. I'm reminded of nothing so much as Issa's haiku (translated by Robert Hass): 'The world of dew is the world of dew. / And yet, and yet ? .' Like this tiny rumination, Orr's poems don't feel like dusty museum pieces, because there's too much urgency of emotion, like the whisperings of a lover." Read the entire Virginia Quarterly Review review.