The Marvels

David Orr

In his second collection, The Marvels, David Orr writes from the conviction that the available world is enough: its worn shirts, coffee cups, rainbows, buses, obsolete machines, failed plans, neighborly borders, and minor acts of courtesy. These poems are clear-eyed without being cold, comic without being merely light. They attend to ordinary things not as symbols waiting to be elevated, but as the actual substance of our shared existence.

Praised by The Washington Post for his “quirky, engaging poetry,” Orr brings formal control, wry wit, whimsy, and an exacting intelligence to the relentless dailiness of life. In “Coffee Cups,” two mugs have been scoured blank by the dishwasher: “Nothing makes them special now. / What they do is all they are.” Yet the household still reaches for them first, “hoping to save the others.” In “Decency,” a nearly useless blue shirt becomes kin to the small social gestures that certify “this shared space as shared”: a held door, a blessing after a sneeze, the habitual signs by which strangers acknowledge one another. And in the title poem, marvels are planted along a property line, where two neighbors meet to prune, argue, trade tools, and admire what grows between them.

Unillusioned but not disenchanted, The Marvels finds its force in persistence, use, courtesy, memory, and care. The poems do not look past the real for consolation. They look steadily at the world we have — its comedy, damage, repetition, and thin but durable fabrics of connection — until its sufficiency comes into view.

“Zeal”

All the dead salmon,
And the live ones as well
Compose and describe
The crucible of zeal.

Yet for humans the sign
Isn’t upstream travel,
But a signal more subtle:
Displacement of words

Into rivers of rules,
And rules about rules,
A wave of increasingly
Baroque tiers and schools;

Each cascade made higher
By being surmounted,
Each new ghost a ghost
An old ghost has haunted.