Word: orr
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...this conduct limited to Dartmouth. In late January, officials were forced to halt a contest between the Bruins and the Black Hawks because spectators were throwing bottles onto the ice. The fans were upset because their hero, Bobby Orr, was tripped at the blue line and no penalty was called. Stan Mikita, echoing Goodenow, expressed amazement at this outburst...
Poems about the writing of poems can be pretty unbearably self-indulgent or just plain dull. Strand makes you forget that, while Orr barely escapes the problem...
Conveniently, Orr has also written a poem entitled "The Room." Since both poems are statements about poetry, the room being the poem, a comparison between the two can show how Orr departs from reality, and what makes that departure so attractive. As you "enter" Strand's "room," a strange one-sided dialogue ensues: he puts questions to you are thinking. While he recognizes his own place in the poem, he remains "at the back/of the room." The words themselves have to do the job of the poetry, to 'fit' the reader...
This room is slightly more gimmicky than Strand's; it leads to another place in the same manner Alice's lookingglass does. And this "other" world is never complete in any of Orr's poems because he uses a number of recurring symbols, which only become complete over a series of poems. Even common phrases like "threading" one's way through trees takes on a new meaning when, in another poem, a man's life is a "skull of red yarn/that unravels as he walks," and in still another poem, "behind you the dream burns the empty nests,/and before...
...Orr remains in a dream where Strand only uses its structure. Burning the Empty Nests shouldn't scare you away just because it has a "symbolic structure." Despite the volume's occasional unevenness, its only bad effect is the craving for more it leaves behind...