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... 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; what people do; where people go; 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. Anyone who believes, in this era of the fragment, that the discursive narrative American poem is linear or simplistic or exhausted, should try these poems; at his best, Orlen is the equal of anyone writing" - Tony Hoagland.