Gregory Orr nació en 1947 en Albany, Nueva York, y creció en las zonas rurales de Hudson Valley, y por un año, en un hospital en el interior de Haití. Recibió un B.A. grado de Antioch College, y una M.F.A. de la Universidad de Columbia. Él es el autor de nueve colecciones de poesía, entre ellos Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005); The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); Burning the Empty Nests (1997); City of Salt (1995), finalista para el L.A. Times Poetry Prize; y Gathering the Bones Together (1975).También es autor de una autobiografía, The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), que fue elegido por Publisher's Weekly como uno de los cincuenta mejores libros de no ficción del año; y tres libros de ensayos, incluyendo Poetry As Survival (2002) y Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985).
Es considerado por muchos como un maestro de lírico verso libre. Orr ha recibido un Guggenheim Fellowship y dos becas de la National Endowment for the Arts. En 2003, fue presentado al Premio de Literatura por la Academia Americana de las Artes y las Letras, y fue un becario del Instituto Rockefeller para el Estudio de la cultura y la violencia. Gregory Orr es catedrático de la Universidad de Virginia, donde fundó el Programa de AMF en 1975, y sirvió desde 1978 hasta 2003 como editor de la Revista Trimestral de Poesía de Virginia. Vive con su esposa Trisha Orr, y sus dos hijas en Charlottesville, Virginia.
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A Litany
I remember him falling beside me,
the dark stain already seeping across his parka hood.
I remember screaming and running the half mile to our house.
I remember hiding in my room.
I remember that it was hard to breathe
and that I kept the door shut in terror that someone would enter.
I remember pressing my knuckles into my eyes.
I remember looking out the window once
at where an ambulance had backed up
over the lawn to the front door.
I remember someone hung from a tree near the barn
the deer we'd killed just before I shot my brother.
I remember toward evening someone came with soup.
I slurped it down, unable to look up.
In the bowl, among the vegetable chunks,
pale shapes of the alphabet bobbed at random
or lay in the shallow spoon.
the dark stain already seeping across his parka hood.
I remember screaming and running the half mile to our house.
I remember hiding in my room.
I remember that it was hard to breathe
and that I kept the door shut in terror that someone would enter.
I remember pressing my knuckles into my eyes.
I remember looking out the window once
at where an ambulance had backed up
over the lawn to the front door.
I remember someone hung from a tree near the barn
the deer we'd killed just before I shot my brother.
I remember toward evening someone came with soup.
I slurped it down, unable to look up.
In the bowl, among the vegetable chunks,
pale shapes of the alphabet bobbed at random
or lay in the shallow spoon.
