Once before I read Gregory Orr’s Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved. I was still in graduate school, and while I had experienced loss—one grandmother died when I was in kindergarten, and after that, several family friends—I didn’t know loss. Loss as an ache deep inside my chest. Loss as a constant friend. I didn’t know grieving’s most perilous moments. I didn’t know how grieving keeps the lost one close.
I read Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved and I liked it. I typed up several poems that I still keep taped above my desk even after two cross-country moves. But I didn’t yet know loss. I didn’t yet understand beloved.
Several weeks ago, I decided I needed to read the book again. I am mired in the end of the semester, in the stress that comes from grading and late papers and the management of panicked student emails. This is my least favorite time of the year—no teaching happens, no joy of sharing and muddling through ideas. Just anxiety and personality management and the deep sense that a system producing this much stress is flawed.
So I read Orr. The first poem of the collection ends, “That death not be oblivion.” Yes, I thought. I now know grief. I now know loss. I know what it means to think of death as oblivion, to long for another understanding. But there is something else in these poems besides loss. Hope, maybe. A belief that loss is not all there is to know. A belief in words, in poetry. A belief in the beauty of the world, even amidst loss. A belief in the beloved, in the body of the beloved.
In one poem, Orr writes:
I’ve known grief. I don’t
Take it lightly. Know how
It gnaws your bones hollow
So you’re afraid to stand up,
Afraid the lightest wind will
Knock you over, blow you away.
Yes, I thought, this is it, exactly. The way grief becomes bodily, the way it consumes everything. But the poem doesn’t end there; it continues:
But maybe the wind is supposed
To blow right through you;
Maybe you’re a tree in winter
And your poem translates
That cold wind into song.
A tree in winter, I thought. Yes, I would like that. I would like to translate cold wind into song. I would like to feel the cold wind moving through me. That way, loss doesn’t win. Grieving isn’t all there is. It is one thing, a cold wind. But it doesn’t get to be all the wind. It doesn’t get to be all the seasons.
And isn’t this one of poetry’s greatest gifts? That it teaches us to understand something as large and complicated as loss in entirely new ways. That it helps us to remember beauty. To remember that loss is “the place/ Where beauty starts. Where/ The heart understands/ For the first time/ The nature of its journey.”
I wasn’t ready for Orr the first time I read his book. I thought the words were lovely, the movement from one poem to the next an important study. I liked the poems. I felt something important happening in them. But now that I know loss—an indelible marker—now that I know beauty, I am reading an entirely new book. And it is changing me, changing my thinking—hopefully for the better.
Planet of the Blind 