Richard Robbins of Corvallis recently released his seventh collection of poetry, “The Oratory of All Souls: Poems,” published by Lynx House Press.
The poems center on fundamental human concerns, especially those connected to personal and community suffering. Their sources are memory, the historical moment, the local objects that compose each and the “terrible love of our imagination” that makes them new in language.
In these poems, the speakers map roads into and out of grief, adopting the role of lover, father or citizen searching for insight or the right way to live. Finally, it becomes a book about breaking and mending, injury and forgiveness, and about our search for resurrection in, and of, daily life.
Robbins was grew up in California and Montana, taught in Minnesota for many years, and recently moved back West to Oregon. He has received awards or residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the Anderson Center, Willapa Bay AiR, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers.
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From 1986 to 2014, he directed the Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State Mankato, which the Minnesota Humanities Commission called “the premier small-town reading series in the country.”
Further information is available at lynxhousepress.com.
