By Debra Cash

In this volume, Gregory Orr revisits a lifetime of poetic concerns with grace, though not always with urgency.

We Interrupt This Broadcast by Gregory Orr. WW. Norton and Company, 112 pages, $27.99

As Gregory Orr settles into old age with his own mortality squarely in view, this most modest of contemporary American poets does what he does best: he considers the lived life that he has written about before and turns it, prismatic, to see if anything has been missed and might yet be treasured.

His theme is easily apprehended. If you didn’t catch — or are too young to remember — the network TV phrase We Interrupt This Broadcast, the book opens with a meditation on Orpheus grown old, “[l]ived almost past purpose,” and a wistful witness to species extinction.

Orr returns to his old touchstones for this valedictory volume. “Pedagogy of Trauma” is like a tongue worrying the empty space where a tooth should be, as he references the horrifying hunting accident where, as a 12-year-old, he killed his brother. This is a story that Orr shared in detail in the indelible A Blessing and in “Gathering the Bones Together,” the title poem of his second book, published in 1975. In his now-standard 2018 guide, Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry, he counsels beginner poets not to try to say “everything” about anything important in one poem, as “important relationships are multiple and complex, and they change over time.” Elsewhere, he notes that poems about trauma act, in part, to exert control over it. Yet the current poem merely gestures at lingering pain, as if retelling the story has allowed him to grow around his culpability, like a tree enclosing and mitigating the barbs of a metal fence inside itself.

Orr’s “small songs” are self-deprecating enough that they sometimes tip into banality. “Feet plead ‘Flee,’ / But heart begs ‘Stay’” are words better applied as lyrics for a forgettable country song. Other poems seem no more than doodles and wordplay, better left for his notebooks.

Yet Orr’s craft deserves its honors. “It Was The Year We Learned” is a sly villanelle on the pandemic, “the year we learned to wash our hands,” followed in short order by another poem about COVID-19 masks. Anything, he demonstrates, can be grist for a poem, especially when the poet is locked in his pandemic bubble with nothing but the passing of time to contemplate.

In an idiosyncratic list of random proverbs, Gregory Orr affirms the truth that has guided his writing, and it’s as good an epitaph as any: “In life, the wound opens in. / In art, it opens out.”

Debra Cash is a Founding Contributing Writer to the Arts Fuse and a member of its Board.