It seems to me that Orr egregiously misreads "Galveston, 1961." He calls it the book's "strangest poem," but what's really strange is his impulse to time travel back to the great hurricane of 1900 instead of reading "Galveston, 1961" as a love poem set in the year its title specifies. Watching a woman he loves swimming in the sea, the speaker observes and renders the optical effects creates by the moving water as it disassembles and plays with her shape. Then she returns to lie by his side on the beach, once more her whole, solid self. But now each individual drop of water on her skin does something like what the whole ocean has just been doing -- it offers new ways of perceiving and marveling at her.
Like other Wilbur love poems, this one is all elegant Apollonian artistry on the surface, with a wealth of Dionysian passion seething underneath.
So I guess I think Orr is also mistaken about that "juxtaposition" and "reducing difference" stuff. (Although it's possible that he and I are simply talking past each other on this score.) Wilbur works frequently with contrasts, juxtaposing frisky and solemn tone, vernacular and elevated vocabulary, small and large or lovely and horrific imagery.
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