Tupelo Press

Synopsis

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.

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.’

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.