Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved

by Gregory Orr

Book Overview

"The heart of Orr's poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry."--San Francisco Review

This book-length sequence of ecstatic, visionary lyrics recalls Rumi in its search for the beloved and its passionate belief in the healing qualities of art and beauty.

Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved is an incantatory celebration of the "Book," an imaginary and self-gathering...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556592299
• ISBN13: 9781556592294
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Poetry For Survival

I don't remember now how I first encountered this book of poems. I bought a copy, read it straight through, and was so moved that I bought several more copies and gave them out to my closest friends last Christmas, 2007. I preach and teach at church and I read several of the poems to our congregation. While not a religious book, Orr's themes are the universal ones that touch all of us: life, death, loss, love and, of course the role poetry plays (like faith) in comprehending them all. I suppose, because of my own experiences of significant loss early in life (my best friend, my sister...), Orr's history resonated with me. I had no idea. A few short months after I fell in love with this book, in February 2008, my own precious 18 year old daughter was killed by a drunk driver. Orr's book was still sitting on my nightstand, and, while I have read many helpful books about loss and grief, nothing has spoken to me like Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved. I have turned to it again and again, and everytime I read it I find new insight, solace, a source of strength. As I have grieved, I have marveled at the total authenticity of Orr's writing. Here is someone who has passed through the fire, survived, and describes the experience, now, as a "blessing." The pain and loss has been transfigured and Orr has returned to bless others with the wisdom and compassion he has gained. It is a message of hope to those who are blind and lost because of their grief. Yesterday morning I read several poems in tears out loud to my wife from the Book that perfectly captured our experience...and offered a small glimmer of hope. I simply can't recommend this Book enough. I have re-read this book more than any book in my considerable library. It a dear friend, a roadmap, a lantern. If the house was on fire, this book would be one of the precious things I would gather and take with me. It is that good. You don't have to be an intellectual or a poet to understand or appreciate it. Only human. The language is simple and direct and unpretentious. I am amazed at Orr's ability to address our deepest experiences without getting lost in the language. If you like Rumi or Rilke, you will find a familiar voice here. I am a poet myself. I am not sure I have come to the place where I believe that poetry resurrects the beloved. I wish it could. But poetry, at least the poetry Mr. Orr has written, has been a life saver. It has helped me to survive.

the very best poetry...and more

I most appreciate poetry that is accompaniment, poetry that leaves me knowing that I'm in intimately shared territory. We're not often encouraged to think of poetry that way. Poets, teachers and students of poetry are apt to think about poems (and collections of poems) in terms of poetic prowess, academic discipline or literary analysis. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but skill and intellectual examinations and appreciations by themselves won't keep me returning to a book almost daily, over a period of years. I want something more. This book continues to bring me the pleasures and consolations of accompaniment, the rigors of provocation, and inspiration to re-think/re-envision the capacities of The Poem/The Word/The World, and our capacities to experience them. I FEEL these poems--as a pulse, as a heartbeat. They are like filaments that bridge the gaps between body and psyche and soul. Among many other things, CONCERNING THE BOOK THAT IS THE BODY OF THE BELOVED is a daring spiritual undertaking, a meditation, an expression of gratitude, an examination of life process and poetic process and the relationships between the two. The language of these poems is deceptively simple, their premises infinitely complex. My copy of this book opens familiarly to two pages, so I seem to start each day with one or the other: The world comes into the poem, The poem comes into the world. Reciprocity--it all comes down To that. As with lovers: When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom. and from the other: ... Was there anything More wonderful? How long did it last? Maybe only a moment; Maybe it was a dream. We were afraid To feel such joy. (stanza break) Still, it changed us, And for once we knew We belonged in the world. If I had to leave my house in a hurry, had time to grab only one book, this would be it.

Wisdom Literature

Orr's new collection is a timeless long poem that reads like wisdom literature and Eastern poetry, and will endure, as they have. This is one of the greatest (in the true sense of the word) poems of this decade, perhaps of the first half of this century. It speaks universally, as truly great poetry must; my father, at whom I've thrown countless poems with little reaction on his part, immediately ordered his own copy of this book after reading mine -- the first book of poetry he has ever owned.

A Poetry For All

Concerning is a book that speaks to the mind and to the heart. It has a doublefold language that both the mind and heart can understand. And in reading, I can hear my heart and mind connect. So odd, because they speak in different languages with only a few shared words and phrases. And I think my mind/brain attaches to Concerning through the written "language" on the page. The brain follows the words, syntax, presentation, logic of each of the poems. But the book is too large for the mind to hold it all. The mind starts swirling in all the subtleties of emotion and contraries within the emotions. The mind gets lost after awhile, but accepts. The heart, however, embraces. It understands. It knows. It doesn't get lost. It knows from from the tone. It understands why each poem weeps and smiles at the same time, or is that the soul? The book is full and full for the person reading it. The book explains poetry, why poetry, and what is poetry. How poetry is an inherent necessity/urge, how it is natural. How each poem tells the same story -- because each person feels grief, love, joy, and anguish -- but each person is unique with their greif, love, joy, and anguish, and so each poem is unique. But this book somehow embraces all the shared emotions we have and talks to all of us and we back to it naturally. The only failing of this book is that not everyone will read it. If they did, I believe everyone would appreciate it and poetry, read more poetry, and know what poetry/life/death/living/loving are and are about. I think this is the most important book of original poems written in the 2000s, and if not, it is for me.

powerful, wise, moving book

It is rare when a recognized poet, at the very height of his talent, gives up the maneuvers and troupes that gained him success, turns away--to begin something completely new. "It is myself that I revise," Yeats wrote. And in this powerful new collection, Gregory Orr does just that. "Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved" is a 200 page long spiritual mediation of epic proportion, described as "an incantatory celebration of the Book, an imaginary and self-gathering anthology of all the lyrics-both poems and songs-ever written." The description is apt, but somewhat limiting. For in addition to its imaginary epic ambition to be "an anthology gathered / since the beginning of time, / gathering itself" the book also serves as an ars poetica, a declaration of this poet's intent to be open ("the poem didn't express / emotion, it was emotion") in giving the voice ("to give form / to her love and grief") to the deceased, and in doing so to find his voice's origin. Orr's philosophy touches upon the limitation of human reach ("unable to touch / the body of the beloved because / inches of it cover your skin"), uttering ("do words outlast / the world / they describe?") and vision ("too many mysteries... Why don't we stop") to propose the feeling as the key to our understanding of our being here ("to see the beloved, / to be seen by the beloved: / that's where being starts"). His philosophy is very skillfully grounded by the intimate details of this world: "When my kids look for me I hope / they can find min in the house, / or reach me by phone. // When that won't work, / I hope they can find me in... the poem or song someone wrote / or one of my own." This grounding of the subliminal is very effective as the collection proceeds to offer elegies to Orr's brother, love poems to his wife, and moving invocations of authors of various times, from Sapho to Apollinaire. Observing his own time, Orr also serves an angry indictment of the stagnation taking place in today's literary arena, of writers who are "half-asleep" in their work, who "could care less". For Orr cares. The passion ("to feel, to feel, to feel") is evident. Orr invests an enormous amount of emotional energy ("for me, my brother / ...the first departure / that tore my heart") in the brief, spare lyrics. That is, perhaps, what makes the book work so well: the volume of Orr's voice can be loud or quiet, a whisper or an incantation, but it is always emotionally charged, always appealing to the reader's senses. It is by the way of the heart that his wisdom comes: "You might think the things I say / are too simple for words, / too embarrassing to be spoken. // But if I repeat the obvious, / where's the harm in that? // May be it was always simple: / loss surrounds us". The book's larger frame is the imaginary spiritual text of "a self gathering of poems" that bear witness to the world in which they are written, providing the key to that world. This clear but quite ambitious structure is bala