The Elephant’s Child: New and 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.
This is a voice we instinctively trust because of its powerful and easy intimacy and its willingness to spill male secrets. The laughter his poems provoke comes from recognition of our common humanity, our passions, and blind spots.
What comes through most powerfully is a profound tenderness and curiosity, a combination that results in heartbreaking, disturbing, and memorable poems. The Elephant’s Child will prove Orlen to be a poet necessary to our understanding of ourselves and our culture.
