Orpheus My Orpheus is a slim, restless collection of seventeen poems in which art is never mere decoration - it is a disruptive force that exposes the hidden dimensions of experience, and poetry itself becomes a form of survival even when the body fails.
Written by New Hampshire poet William Doreski, a former student of Helen Vendler, this collection moves in accentual verse - a fast-swerving, seven- to nine-syllable line that veers from the domestic to the mythic to the grotesque with startling emotional agility. The effect is disorienting in the best way, keeping readers slightly off-balance, the way a dream does.
From the opening poem, "The Whole History of Art," where an oversized canvas invades a library reading room, to the title poem's avant-garde restaging of the Orpheus myth - a severed, still-singing head in a cooler, maenads in fright wigs, a Pulitzer speech folded into date-night fantasy - Doreski returns again and again to poetry's central image: the song that survives the singer's destruction. The painter, the charcoal-covered lover, the disassembling laptop - all become, in their own way, singing heads.
Against this myth-making and dark satire, Doreski also writes a quieter register: poems of long relationships, aging bodies, and a specific New England landscape of gardens, birds, and river towns. "Three Sweaters" threads funerals, winter beaches, and Bergman films through the colors of three sweaters. "Trying to Make Coffee," the collection's darkest comic poem, turns a kitchen accident into a chlorine gas attack narrated with chilling, deadpan self-absorption.
Orpheus My Orpheus is uneven by design - the emotional whiplash between tenderness and myth, the elevated and the mundane, keeps readers on the edge of their seats without allowing their brains any repose.
For readers who love literary allusion, myth retelling, surreal imagery, philosophical reflection, and emotional intricacy,
Doreski's voice echoes Mark Strand and Stephen Dobyns - a poet unafraid to make art dangerous again.