River Inside the River by Gregory Orr (review)

Not a lot of paradise gets lost in Gregory Orr’s stunning reimagining of the Adam and Eve story. In the poem sequence that begins Orr’s new collection, the Garden of Eden is a static, silent place. God doesn’t expel humans so much as he unintentionally sets their exodus in motion by assigning Adam to name things. Once Adam discovers the creative power of language, there is no turning back. Naming is not enough.

“Adam felt the sounds / He made / Build bars around / The things he saw,” Orr tells us in the poem “To Noun.” Adam experiences a headier, more liberating pleasure when he captures movement and action in speech. So, in “To Verb” Adam discovers words as a way of seeing (“The beats were beasting / The birds, birding about—”). Then, of course, comes Eve and the particular actions that displease God:

To Do

God made a big to doAbout their doing,And it’s true—Those early daysWere festive,Given each deedThey did was doneFor the first time,Was essence.

                       To boast,To sleep, to flirt:Each verb had dewUpon it, and was new.

In Orr’s telling, this story is first and foremost about language. The feeling Adam experiences watching Eve from a distance summons a new word to his mind: “Forlorn.” Other emotions follow in poems titled with infinitives: “To Long,” “To Hope,” “To Love.” Doing, feeling, and most of all speaking are worth the price of straying from the security of a sterile paradise into a world with loss and grief. When Adam and Eve exit, the animals even choose to trail them, emptying out Eden because they miss “those human voices / Calling, Those bright threads.”

Orr’s poems—mostly short-lined and succinct—belie this book’s sweeping ambition. There is an old-fashioned poetry here in the best sense: Poetry that is thoughtful, emotionally resonant, pleasing to the ear, and that addresses the human condition directly. With typical economy, for example, Orr gives us this seven-line poem:

To Weep

Tears were forbidden in Eden—God didn’t want the soil embittered.

Beyond the gates, they were freeTo weep.

              And weeping becameA form of freedom:It meant you felt, it meant you had a self.

In the book’s second section, in a poem sequence titled “The City of Poetry,” Orr distills his biography and pays homage to the poets who saved his life. He recalls the defining tragedies of his childhood, as he has before in his long career of poetry and memoir: at age twelve he shot his brother to death in a hunting accident, followed a few years later by the death of his mother. Then, at eighteen, he traveled to Alabama for the Civil Rights Movement. Armed segregationists kidnapped him and locked him alone overnight in a cell, leaving him with—not a Bible—but a book of Keats that he carried. Convinced he would be killed the next morning, he read “Ode to a Nightingale” until “The poem was my ladder: / Rungs and lifts of escape.” He goes on: “I read it at dusk, climbing / With each line.”

Orr has written twelve collections of poetry, but River Inside the River is his third that builds a lyric sequence he began with Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved. Together, his three latest collections testify to and celebrate the redemptive power of language, particularly the language of poetry. While he started the sequence with a whirling dervish of a collection, incantatory and ecstatic in a way reminiscent of Rumi, this newest work ranges widely in tone—from playful to earnest, narrative to lyric, and personal to mythic.

The third and final section of River Inside the River reprises the visionary, incantatory music Orr adopted in Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved. The nouns “book” and “beloved” and “word” accumulate power through repetition, as if he finds them spiritual. They begin to function as deep images. Behind their apparent simplicity lies...