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Named a Massachusetts Honor Book in Poetry for 2005 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book Poetry that finds sense in life through a confrontation with death.
"This is so rare—to encounter poems written from a thinking-heart! There isn't a page in this book that isn't bracing; Steven Cramer is determined to discover what he didn't know before he started. Bracing in the way of crucial conversations when everything depends on not defending, not glancing away or distracting oneself. I felt implicated in every encounter—that's what these poems are—encounters with a reality that only the most rigorous poetry can approach. Uncompromising song." —Marie Howe "[A] deft fourth volume from the Massachusetts-based Cramer. . . . Tender, surprising poems." —Publisher's Weekly 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry Nominee
In Steven Cramer's fourth collection of poems, we encounter a winning combination of grace, eclectic intelligence, and dryly comic self-regard. Goodbye to the Orchard is a refreshing tonic to the claustrophobia of much contemporary poetry. Cramer takes subjects that are familiar at first glance—we thought we knew all about "The Soul," a "Sixties Couple," a "Morning Walk in the Orchard," or how "Word Gets Around"—and makes them oddly affecting, weirdly fresh. Icons of high and popular culture appear in unpredictable ways (Shakespeare, Hendrix, Rin-Tin-Tin, the Marquis de Sade), so that as a whole Goodbye to the Orchard strikes an original tone—a curious, undeluded sweetness. No other poet sounds quite the same note.
Cramer employs agile structures in service of ambitious themes, his work by turns brave, disarmingly funny, and adroit at symmetrical form and free-verse syncopation. At the heart of the book we encounter a sister's fatal illness, and these poems tell us of our search, especially at such last moments, to find words for what can't, ultimately, be described: "Maybe it's just a better childhood—" brother says to dying sister, "this life after death, I mean..." Moving in the extreme, such scenes are captured with unsentimental accuracy.
Beginning with the word "defeat" and concluding on the word "alive," Goodbye to the Orchard testifies that we must remain open in the face of loss, because loss is a given; and that our glimpses of the mysteries—whether of dying or living—are all we're allowed. But those prismatic views, well rendered, are all we need.
Steven Cramer is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Eye That Desires to Look Upward (1987), The World Book (1992), and Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997). His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, and TriQuarterly; as well as in The POETRY Anthology, 1912-2002. Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, M.I.T., Tufts University, and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University, Charlotte. He currently directs the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge. He lives with his wife, Hilary, and their two children, Charlotte and Ethan, in Lexington, Massachusetts.
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