Ausable Press: The Elephant's Child


ABOUT THE AUTHOR \| SELECTED POEMS \| VIEW CART “The deep meaning of all storytelling underlies Steve Orlen’s poetry. I want to call it a moral dimension. He does not tell us his tales merely to amuse us, although, like all good storytellers, he is the best of company. His poems are testimonies, songs of experience, which remind us we are not alone in the world. And there is magic in their telling.” —Mark Jarman “Steve Orlen is a poet bent on finding connections—with others, with himself, with history—while acknowledging all the obstacles to such a project and refusing to reach any position that has not slowly evolved from his own experience. As a result he creates work of peculiar honesty and intimacy. The poems often begin in reminiscence, but the narratives of the past serve mainly as starting points for the narrative enacted before us in the present as the poet follows out the emotional logic of association, an open, inclusive process that that leads casually, without strain, to surprising discoveries. “—Carl Dennis REVIEWS & COMMENTS “The playful parts,” Steve Orlen has said of Jarrell’s poetry, the poet to which Orlen’s work was been likened, “I found comforting; the severe parts I found revealing of human nature”—a comment no less revealing of Orlen’s own poetry in his sixth volume, The Elephant’s Child: New and Selected Poems 1978—2005, a deeply-felt and expressed collection whose subjects of family, masculinity, childhood, love and lust evoke our own stories of the miraculous and the sacred in what we can’t, or won’t, admit: the taboo and unspoken desire to understand, as Orlen says, “how puzzling it is to be a human being in the world.” —Valerie Bandura Finn, Review/Revue