Books
Watch a video of my reading "Writing from Alonissos, Greece", from the "Whose Body? Where My Dreaming and My Loving Is" series sponsored by the Dodge Poetry Program and the Poetry Coalition: Organizing Themes for Societal Importance.
Losing the Horizon
Losing the Horizon is award-winning poet Priscilla Orr’s second collection. Her first , collection of poems was Jugglers and Tides.
“ We who are older live in layers,” Priscilla Orr declares in Losing the Horizon, her second full-length volume of poetry. These layers are the “accretion” of the natural world (snow, sand, leaf, dirt) which she deftly and delicately describes, and, more profoundly, the inevitable strata of “ineffable elements,” time, loss and love. The “dear dead” inhabit many of these poems where they “shunt through” and “pierce” sleep, a “whistling whorl from that other world.” Nonetheless, these poems are not so much elegies as testimonials to our stubborn ability to carry on, to survive, Looking squarely - sometimes humorously - at the life lead and the pain endured, the poems are small miracles of acceptance and transformation where bone itself becomes a “kaleidoscope of cartilage.” This is a moving, poignant collection from a mature voice at the top of her craft. ~ Paul Genega, author of That Fall, New & Selected Poems
Jugglers and Tides
“In these direct unashamed and moving poems of ‘fierce uncoupled love’, Orr gives voice to her mother’s perennial silence, and to the longing that silence ripened. Grief and desire join to mourn what the tide has taken away -- or never brings in, and to return (in her words) the sprawl of the world to us, shaped, abundant, “in full bouquet”.
~ Eleanor Wilner, author of Sarah’s Choice