The Elephant's Child

by Orlen, Steve

• ISBN13: 9781931337281
• ISBN10: 1931337284
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-09-01
• Publisher: Ausable Pr

Summary

The Elephant's Child: New and Selected Poems 1978a??2005 offers a generous retrospective from a poet whose passionate, straight-talking poems have been delighting readers for forty years. Orlen writes about what it means to be male in our time and culture, and does so with disarming charm, honesty, directness, and humor. Like the elephant's child in the Kipling tale, he has an insatiable curiosity about everything: love and sex foremost, but also about the ways in which we understand or misunderstand one another, how we perceive race, class, and gender, how memory works, and how we struggle to make sense of our often overwhelming and confusing world. This is a voice we instinctively trust because of its powerful and easy intimacy and its willingness to spill male secrets. The laughter his poems provoke comes from recognition of our common humanity, our passions, and blind spots. What comes through most powerfully is a profound tenderness and curiosity, a combination that results in heartbreaking, disturbing, and memorable poems. The Elephant's Child will prove Orlen to be a poet necessary to our understanding of ourselves and our culture.

Table of Contents

THE ELEPHANT'S CHILD: NEW POEMS
A Stairwell, Outside a Bank	1	(1)
The Art of Conversation	2	(3)
Reunions	5	(2)
A Day in the Life	7	(3)
Three Teenage Girls: 1956	10	(1)
Men on the Shore, Fish in the Sea	11	(2)
The Pripet Marshes	13	(2)
The Advantages of the Barbarians	15	(1)
Lewis Carroll Thinks About Time	16	(1)
Let It Snow	17	(2)
Blind Date	19	(1)
Sing for Me	20	(2)
When You're Not Looking Everyone Is Dancing	22	(3)
Dodo	25	(2)
The City of Poets: 1966	27	(3)
Poem for Women and for Men	30	(9)
from PERMISSION TO SPEAK (1978)
Six Persimmon	39	(1)
Permission To Speak	40	(1)
Unwritten Letters	41	(1)
In Praise of Beverly	42	(3)
from A PLACE AT THE TABLE (1981)
Family Cups	45	(1)
Big Friend of the Stones	46	(2)
The Great Wall of China	48	(2)
Friends	50	(5)
from THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS (1992)
Religious Feeling	55	(1)
Standing in Line for The Pickle Family Circus	56	(1)
Shame	57	(1)
The Older Woman	58	(1)
Conversation with the Dead	59	(1)
Red Leaves	60	(1)
The Bridge of Sighs	61	(4)
from KISSES (1997)
Poem Against Ideas	65	(6)
Nobody's Jew	71	(3)
Field Guide	74	(2)
Shyness	76	(2)
The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (1900-1920)	78	(2)
Stolen Kisses: 1968	80	(5)
The Meaning of Romance	85	(3)
God's Mistakes	88	(3)
I Want to be a Girl	91	(3)
The Shaping Ground	94	(2)
Genealogy	96	(5)
from THIS PARTICULAR ETERNITY (2001)
Monkey Mind	101	(1)
Happy As I Am	102	(4)
Taboo	106	(3)
Cruelty	109	(3)
Song: the Kiss	112	(2)
In the House of the Voice of Maria Callas	114	(1)
Onamastics and the Falling Snow	115	(3)
Ars Poetica: Most Embarrassing Moments	118	(3)
One-Man Band	121	(2)
The Painter	123	(1)
Butterflies That Save Us from Ourselves	124	(2)
The Great Wheel	126	(3)
The Beach at Nice	129	(1)
Reverie: The Graveyard Shift	130	(4)
Reverie: The Saturday Evening Post	134	(3)
Nature Rarely Confides in Me	137	(6)
Acknowledgments	143