Gregory Orr’s Lyric Sequence: Orpheus and Eurydice

Description

Copper Canyon Press (paperback, 2001)

Publisher Marketing: How can I celebrate love/ now that I know what it does? So begins this book-length lyric sequence which reinhabits and modernizes the story of Orpheus, the mythic master of the lyre (and father of lyric poetry) and Eurydice, his lover who died and whom Orpheus tried to rescue from Hades.

Gregory Orr uses as his touchstone the assertion that myths attempt to narrate a whole human experience, while at the same time serving a purpose which resists explanation. Through poems of passionate and obsessive erotic love, Orr has dramatized the anguished intersection of infinite longings and finite lives and, in the process, explores the very sources of poetry.

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