“Killing Orpheus” by Forester McClatchey

In the titular poem of Forester McClatchey’s debut poetry collection, Killing Orpheus, the poet-prophet struggles to play a satisfactory song to the masses. From the start, we feel the audience wants sordid entertainment. When “sickle-girl” moves in, the crowd hushes: “Each cut she makes is a marvel of efficiency.” The crowd is drawn into the decapitator’s precision and artistry, but make no mistake—this is an execution. The speaker ends: “The applause is loud and brief.” McClatchey’s poems perform such acts of precision. Though “Killing Orpheus” is one tercet exception, almost every poem is a reshuffling of the sonnet form that most often gives microscopic and megaphonic attention to readily available domestic scenes and relationships. In contrast, “Killing Orpheus” considers the cruelty and indifference of the populist spectacle. The word “brief” at the end of the poem gives readers pause. Does the audience stop its applause early as a form of moral hesitation, or is attention turning to something else? Enter digital entertainment and political strategy, 2026.

But who is Orpheus in 2026? The only time a poet will make the cover of the New York Times is if he/she/they has done something terribly wrong. And lest we forget, the poem portrays not the ancient Orpheus, but “a criminal dressed as Orpheus” and the “sickle-girl” is merely dressed as a “maenad.” One reading of the poem considers the fate of true poet-prophets in 2026, but another considers the question of the poet’s own authority in the public arena. Most poets never garner the attention of a crowd, even if dressed as Orpheus. We never discover the crime of the one dressed as Orpheus, but entertainment is most vital in this new American culture. The best form of entertainment the poet can offer is submission to his own execution, maybe to his own extinction. He’s cut down by a combination of innocence, ignorance, and cruel artistry.

Almost every poem in Killing Orpheus wrestles with the certainty and ubiquity of death.  “To love a thing is to know a thing will die,” the poet declares in “Wringing Lilies from the Acorn” when considering the lavish illusion of spring’s return. Spring, like any rebirth, is a “pseudo-lie” and “the test of joy, the one we’ll never pass.” Death and loss feel more true, more permanent. In “Carcass” the poet considers a dead dog on the morning walk and bemoans: “Impossible to milk a moral from / that corpse,” but despite this complaint, the poems attempt to milk meaning from a myriad assemblage of carcasses and corpses. Hope, like joy, is absurd and adjacent to the grief of disaster.

Though the title, “Waiting for Birth,” feels like it will move another direction, it is a fake-out. A luna moth, a temporary and beautiful creature, falls out of the sky, and the poem resists any birth language or sentiment. Though the title implies hope, the poem reeks of loss and miscarriage. The poem’s “you” becomes “we” as the couple “struck a truce with loss” and ricochets toward love, that “bizarre abyss.” Love even feels like a strange and dangerous void. The rational idea of the child hovers close to nonexistence. Even as the daughter breathes a few poems later, the poet calls her clumsy breathing “the slow, awkward rowing away from death.” Respiration, life, and amazement all row away from death’s whirlpool, and “the gift” of life must come from the slog of labor.

McClatchey’s poetry feels chiseled out of time. His lines are occasionally complete with metrical aphorism, but more often, he cuts the syntax midline, creating caesura, distance, and surprise in the echoing rhyme. The poet also loves archaic and anachronistic words such as “gladdens,” “parlance,” or “elenchus.” Like W.H. Auden, McClatchey is clearly a believer in form and tradition, but Killing Orpheus is most resonant with Wallace Stevens, a poet drawn into and rejecting Romantic impulses in favor of a poetic realism that strips down and reconstructs. Almost every poem in the book obeys Wallace Stevens’s aphorism from “Sunday Morning”: “Death is the mother of beauty.”

In the ekphrastic poem “Ophelia,” the poet expresses surprise at Millais’s rendering of the Shakespearean daughter: “No death should ever be this beautiful.” But early surprise concludes with acceptance and the desire to keep “the lush ghost” as she is—to know her startling beauty in death. And this becomes a comfort: “Ophelia infects / the facts we’re so certain of.” Finding an aesthetic in death is a means of overcoming and transcending what has confounded the poet for most of the book. As with “Killing Orpheus,” Ophelia’s death is one of submission. Death pairs with beauty the way love pairs with hurt. These are truths we must learn to confess. At the end of “The Monster Captures Frankenstein,” the creature-speaker confesses:

You made a creature capable of hurt,

a creature capable, in other words,

of loving you, then crept away.

 

Why? Go on. I’ll let you finish.

Mother, Father, Maker, God:

Untie your tongue. Amaze me. Speak.

There is little rationale behind creation, existence or hope; the creature-speaker begs for and demands answers. The “monster” demands while the poet-prophet and the Shakespearean daughter give in. In the first poem, “Questions for the Dead”, of final section, the poet turns to a dead squirrel for answers:

Today I saw a squirrel with two ropes

of ants flowing rapidly out of its eyes.

Jasmine petals fell around the corpse.

 

Tell me how to live. Worm into my ear.

I want one instant of my life to be clear.

“Worm” is a unique choice of verb in a text that begs us to consider how death works on us. Worms work in and through the dead bodies. Worms translate the dead into something else, making the corpse fertile again. The poem translates death into clarity and resonance, worming death into a beautiful couplet. Even the “moth-eyed” infant daughter whose life swells to fluttering in the first few sequences gets a worm, “Love’s lashing grub” in “On the Nature of Yes,” probably the most unabashedly hopeful poem in the debut.

Each section of the book comes in waves of casual observation, literary invention, and death rumination. In section 1, McClatchey’s poems drift toward the personal before he often employs masks and ekphrasis in section 2 to further investigate similar content. The final section might indulge in quotidian aesthetics and the quiet relief of the “snarling pencil,” but the poet is wary of a shared understanding. In “Smoke Jumper,” McClatchy presents a sonnet crown that is part “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” A wildfire fighter observes a charred cougar corpse that comes to represent something that he can’t express: “a kind of innocence, a bizarre / affection, rising for the dead and noble thing.” The cougar becomes an ideal that he cannot share with his crew or even his wife. This is the burden of poetry—a beauty that demands submission and self-sacrifice. At times, it speaks, and at others, it is silent offering little beyond something unnamed and deeply personal.

Another notable silence in the book comes at the end of “Adam’s Task.” The prelapsarian Adam hears first “the whorled language of ferns” and “the pure / elucidation of rivers combing moss.” As Adam listens, he is “thick / with muted love” and suddenly, “a cork unstopped his throat.” Language pours forth, and when it’s done, it’s done: “Cold quiet soaked / the woods. He begged the trees. Now nothing spoke.” Abundance is always threatened by loss, even paradise comes to grief. McClatchey shows us that beauty and inspiration are demanding and require submission. They can also come to an end for no good reason.

In the final sonnet, “Elegy for Several Selves,” we see the final giving in to mutability. The speaker’s iambic-bounce shifts to whatever’s needed—an old house, a final gesture, a broth, a color, a plant—whatever the poet needs only to end with this couplet: “And you, my love, are nothing on this earth / if not the crushing blank that ends my work.” In the whimsical finale, the poet says we are both nothing, but also the metrical heartbeat, the iamb, of existence. We are nothing and everything as we will always be. The poet abandons the attempt to milk meaning by accepting that change, even death, can be beautiful.

In 2026, poets, or any criminal claiming to be a poet, should in fact, beware their own extinction. AI and screens have long threatened the integrity of our attention and our ability to make conscious choices. But McClatchey tells us, great beauty, shared or not, still resides in the personal construction of poems. We have no choice but to give in to change, to accept it with grace and eloquence, perhaps even to marvel at its terrible beauty.

Forester McClatchey

Forester McClatchey is a poet, critic, and painter from Atlanta, Georgia. He is a graduate of MFA@FLA, and his work has appeared in 32 Poems, Hopkins Review, Subtropics, The London Magazine, and Harvard Review, among others. He teaches at Atlanta Classical Academy.