JACKSON, Tenn. — April 11, 2003 — Poet Gregory Orr presented selections from his most recent collection, The Caged Owl on the campus of 51社区 April 10.
|
Poet Gregory Orr presents works from his collection The Caged Owl in Union's Harvey Hall. |
Among the works presented was 鈥淕athering the Bones,鈥� about a childhood hunting accident when Orr shot and killed his younger brother. Its final stanza reads, 鈥淚 was twelve when I killed him;/ I felt my own bones wrench from my body./ Now I am twenty-seven and walk/ beside this river, looking for them./ They have become a bridge/ that arches toward the other shore.鈥�
鈥淚t felt like the room disappeared,鈥� said junior Rebecca Phillips, after the reading.
鈥淕regory Orr writes poems of great compression and intense lyricism,鈥� said Bobby Rogers, associate professor of English at Union. 鈥淗e is one of the best lyric poets at work today.鈥�
Phillips said she appreciates Union鈥檚 willingness to host poets and other writers like Orr. 鈥淚t shows that the university takes note of the writers who are making a difference and wants to expose the students to those writers first hand,鈥� she said.
A professor of English at the University of Virginia since 1975, Orr is the author of seven collections of poems including The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems and City of Salt. His work has appeared in Harvard Magazine, Boston Review and Poetry.
Orr is the poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review and a columnist and editor at Sacred Bearings: A Journal for Survivors. He is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships, he has also been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for Culture, Violence, and Survival.