This Particular Eternity

Poetry. Steve Orlen is the foremost contemporary embodiment of the poetic legacy of Randall Jarrell. Orlen's poems are more streetwise, but they have Jarrell's sad, wise eyes, the not-quite-jaded wonder, the vision of our folly which both sees and forgives. And the voice, in its alloy of the ruthless and the sentimental, is Jarrellian, a vehicle of such casual, confiding earnestness, one hardly notices the many chord changes, the masterful loosening and tightening of the narrative coils. Keen in their social observation, at times bluntly personal, full of slow builds and quick stabs, these poems are rich in what Jarrell called "the ordinariness of life; where people go; what people do; the ways of life." Their real subject is the education-in-progress of the soul, always a stranger, and the bemused, inquiring witness of narration itself.