These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this hard-edged, worried world? Into this cultural uncertainty Gregory Orr's spirited meditation on the surprisingly tensile strength of poetry in the face of profound suffering and grief presents a welcome fresh view of the ancient human instinct to cry out and to praise.

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

What is remembered is what becomes reality.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft