Midwest Book Review - Blue Orange

Robert Grunst's Blue Orange is featured in the June 2012 issue of The Midwest Book Review's Small Press Bookwatch.

It is all too easy to lose sight of the simple magnificence of the world around us. Blue Orange is the latest collection of poetry from Robert Grunst as he discusses the ideas of nature and our relationships with it. A fine assortment from a highly prolific poet, Blue Orange is a must for general poetry collections, very much recommended. "An Apple Orchard in Prussia": Take the apple out of the apple now, absent the two/syllables, low frontal vowel, voiceless bilabial/stop, and the lateral, erase men's hands and space across/which hands might reach; disjoin the ladder. Reduce the trees/to seeds, seeds to light apart from water and dirt:/no orchard then, no canvas, no stitches, no straps,/no pickers' sacks, no long-boned men aloft, no knees/nor crooks for knees, no telltale leaves, no breeze,/no harvest but memory of harvest, no sleet, no pedestal,/no entablature above which between and nothing rest./Take away every vestigial measure, every scar/and scale, smoke rising form the kitchen chimney,/women's white aprons sunning on a line,/every kingbird and wren that made the ancestors sing.