The Elephant's Child: New & Selected Poems 1978–2005

Steve Orlen

The Elephant’s Child: New & Selected Poems 1978–2005 offers a generous retrospective from a poet whose passionate, straight-talking poems have been delighting readers for forty years. Orlen writes about what it means to be male in our time and culture, and does so with disarming charm, honesty, directness, and humor. Like the elephant’s child in the Kipling tale, he has an insatiable curiosity about everything: love and sex foremost, but also about the ways in which we understand or misunderstand one another, how we perceive race, class, and gender, how memory works, and how we struggle to make sense of our often overwhelming and confusing world.

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ISBN: 9781931337281

Format: Paperback

A Stairwell, Outside a Bank

for Tony Hoagland

Through the iron bars, a stairwell, and in it
The shadows of the iron bars, black, aslant, severe,
And gray concrete steps going up and going down,
And a dark well of coolness rising like an echo,
But no one, nothing flourishing, astonishing or dying,
Until I finally asked myself what kept me there in reverie
Maybe five minutes before I went into the bank.
The other night I was strolling on Fourth Avenue,
The old sixties street where the retro-hippies
Lounge and beg, and the drunks
Walk with the crazies who carry Bibles
From The Second Free Will Baptist Church.
Strung among them, teenagers
Punked-out like metal flowers on display
Who watch with contempt the middle-aged
Entering the restaurants and looking back
With fear, or pity, or memories of the good old days
When questions still outnumbered answers.
The man who blocked my path
Seemed neither dangerous nor nuts.
About my height and age. A back-pack
And his boots looked sensible for miles of walking.
Are you a spiritual man? he asked.
And instead of answering glibly
I stood there and wondered what spiritual meant.
What people mean by it. I didn’t engage the man.
What came to mind were iron bars and shadows, and the stairs, and no
Meaning in that but some beauty I must have seen,
Cold, as some beauty is, and momentary,
And through the gap between the beauty and the void
Something like an echo of water running over rocks.
If I felt lighter than my body
I didn’t have the means to weigh it then.

About the Author

Steve Orlen was the author of five collection of poetry. He received numerous honors for his work and his poems appeared in Ploughshares. He taught at the University of Arizona and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Orlen lived in Tucson, Arizona before he passed away in 2010.

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Reviews

“‘The playful parts,’ Steve Orlen has said of [Randall] Jarrell’s poetry, the poet to which Orlen’s work was been likened, ‘I found comforting; the severe parts I found revealing of human nature’—a comment no less revealing of Orlen’s own poetry in his sixth volume, The Elephant’s Child: New & Selected Poems 1978–2005, a deeply-felt and expressed collection whose subjects of family, masculinity, childhood, love and lust evoke our own stories of the miraculous and the sacred in what we can’t, or won’t, admit: the taboo and unspoken desire to understand, as Orlen says, ‘how puzzling it is to be a human being in the world.'” —Review Revue

“Steady, supportive, gentle… Orlen’s enduring gifts extend well past his own work to the hearts of poets unfolding in the classroom.” —Kingdom Books Blog

“The deep meaning of all storytelling underlies Steve Orlen’s poetry. I want to call it a moral dimension. He does not tell us his tales merely to amuse us, although, like all good storytellers, he is the best of company. His poems are testimonies, songs of experience, which remind us we are not alone in the world. And there is magic in their telling.” —Mark Jarman