Orpheus on the Red Line

$19.95

by Theodore Deppe

Deppe’s scrupulous attention is tender, uncompromising, and full of a rare quality of moral weight. Witness has been raised to an art. For more than two decades a nurse in coronary care units and psychiatric hospitals, Theodore Deppe has also been an influential teacher of writing. His poems are genuinely and precisely dramatic as they embrace complicated human relationships in flux, with “compact lyrical narratives” (Eamon Grennan) that embody remarkable people in encounters with each other and their landscapes.

by Theodore Deppe

Deppe’s scrupulous attention is tender, uncompromising, and full of a rare quality of moral weight. Witness has been raised to an art. For more than two decades a nurse in coronary care units and psychiatric hospitals, Theodore Deppe has also been an influential teacher of writing. His poems are genuinely and precisely dramatic as they embrace complicated human relationships in flux, with “compact lyrical narratives” (Eamon Grennan) that embody remarkable people in encounters with each other and their landscapes.

About the Author

Ted Deppe was born in Minnesota, and grew up in Indiana. He worked for many years as a coronary-care and psychiatric nurse and has taught creative writing in high schools, universities, and graduate programs in the United States, England, and Ireland. His previous books include Children of the Air and The Wanderer King (Alice James, 1990 and 1996), and Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2003). He currently teaches in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program and directs Stonecoast in Ireland, where he now lives with his wife, poet Annie Deppe.

Advanced Praise

“Deppe’s scrupulous attention is tender, uncompromising, and full of a rare quality of moral weight. Witness has been raised to an art. Everything is at stake in these painstaking, loving observations.” —Mark Doty

“Ted Deppe’s poems, which a reader might admire for their narrative gift and the beauty and force of their language alone, also look unflinchingly into the heart of human suffering while equally acknowledging the joy and peace that are possible in our lives. These poems, which chart Deppe’s peripatetic life in Ireland and the United States, trade the lack of a permanent home for an at-homeness in the moment…. Orpheus on the Red Line finds those improbable but real moments when we all can toast the peace and mystery of a ‘superabundance of being.’” —Robert Cording

“‘For that moment,’ says Ted Deppe in the opening poem of his rich new collection, ‘it was the house of the world.’ He speaks of a pine tree, but the description might be applied with justice to his own poetry, for it is precisely this house of the world—the ordinary world lovingly seen—that he throws open for us, filling it moment by moment with luminous details. One comes away from these compact lyrical narratives with a sense that whatever the poet’s eye or mind has fallen on, been compelled to attention by, is somehow cared for, cherished, allowed to be its own full self.” —Eamon Grennan

“The title drew my eye—I’ve always been a sucker for Greek mythology—but I didn’t read the book right away. It went into a stack by my favorite chair for a couple of months until one early morning I picked it up, intending to read just a little before getting down to my own writing. Soon I felt a prickle of excitement, hairs rising at the nape of the neck, and my morning plans went out the window.” —Penelope Moffet, Rattle

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-75-0