Praise for The Blessing
"[Orr] is a poet in the lyric tradition—the poetry of emotions, often in the voice of individual experience, which also lends itself to song." —Krista Tippett, On Being
“Orr has dedicated his life and work to redeeming suffering through poetry as lyric biography. He feels this project has saved him from wandering in a wilderness, reassured by conversations with readers and with writers living and dead who have faced similar loss, pain, and transformative beauty. All his work is of a piece, poems, essays, and memoir: a song of experience, joining a chorus of meaning.”—American Academy of Arts and Letters
“Orr balances lyric grace with careful restraint to produce a convincing memoir about facing down despair. . . . Orr manages to confer spiritual power upon his readers by finding meaning in what most of us could not bear to endure.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The Blessing is an extraordinary book, full of luminous details, beautifully clear writing, and short, gorgeous chapters. . . . While The Blessing tells the story of becoming a poet and recounts a childhood full of wonder, it is more insistently a tale of survival, of a painful blessing, wounding, and growing through trauma and tragedy.”—American Poetry Review
“Orr has accomplished an incredible feat, managing to bring together his tragic and triumphant personal narrative with his belief in the importance and impact of the personal lyric poem. . . . A sophisticated and convincing case for the ‘transformative power’ of lyric poetry, as evidenced in Orr’s own life experiences.”—Valparaiso Poetry Review
“For Orr, poetry was a thread to hold onto during his darkest hours. Once he had hold of that thread, Orr knew that he could find his way out of the labyrinth of his own consciousness. . . . This book offers eloquent testimony to the engaging power of art in a man’s life.”—Washington Post
“The inadvertent shooting death of his brother by poet Orr gives this memoir a god-awful specific gravity and spurs the author’s search for ways to live on. . . . Writing has sustained him. . . . Here, the old and new meanings of ‘blessing’—to sprinkle with blood, to confer spiritual power—harrowingly collide.”—Kirkus
"The Blessing proffers twin gifts to the reader. The first is the story . . . The second, equally powerful, is Orr's writing. It's remarkable to me that so gifted a lyric poet could be so fine a story-teller . . . The Blessing is a remarkable achievement—honest, lyrical, poignant, and, above all, life-affirming." —Virginia Quarterly Review
"Orr's book is an amazing chronicle of his early life and of the answers he discovers to the questions he must ask. It is also an essential window into how art—in this case, poetry—can play an important role in survival and transformation." —Creative Nonfiction
"Orr has distilled the anguish of his youth right down to its holy bones in a breathtaking chronicle of long-term shock and the arduous road to expiation. In each poem-like chapter, tension, sorrow, and the darkness give way to the mystical beauty of metaphor as Orr struggles to make sense of yet another horror, including his mother's death in Haiti and his violent experiences as a Civil Rights worker in the Deep South. Everywhere young Orr turned, he confronted the worst of humanity and the chilling sense of a world without a soul until he found poetry, the thread, Orr writes, that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light." —Booklist
"An astounding memoir saturated with themes of death, shame, and guilt . . . The Blessing is highly recommended for all libraries." —Library Journal
"Orr's gripping chronicle of his troubled boyhood is alternately self-conscious, moving, and revelatory . . . It never fails to entertain, mystify, and surprise." —Publishers Weekly
Praise for Gregory Orr
"Orr's thesis is the transcendent power of personal lyric poetry, its balm, and, far more than that, its ability to enable persons who have undergone trauma to fortify and in a sense to re-create themselves by speaking out through the exactitude and dignity of poetry. This is an utterly simplified sentence about an extremely complicated universal process—extraordinary and yet not hard to follow in Orr's clear writing, which is fortified by a wonderous collection of examples and quotations—almost, I want to say, witnessings." —Mary Oliver
"The heart of Orr's poetry, now as ever, is the enigmatic image . . . mystical, carnal, reflective, wry." —San Francisco Review
"The craft on display [in River Inside the River]—the distillation of emotion and language—will inspire respect from even the less spiritually minded reader; there is no doubting Orr's authenticity. This is a man who found healing in the words of others, and I for one am thankful for his generosity in making a gift to us of his own." —The Guardian
"A master of the lyric poem." —Paris Review
"Orr serves as a sage and gentle guide, sharing wisdom about the creative process and how poetry can enrich those who embrace it . . . [A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry] is revolutionary . . . because it shows readers how to turn an occasional, burning impulse into a lifelong pleasure." —Washington Post
"Three decades have passed since Orr published his strange and quirkily inward first book, Burning the Empty Nests, and joined the ranks of what was then called, often derisively, the neo-surrealist school. Seven collections later, he has come far enough from those brief, knotted poems—whose images gave them an other-planetary density out of proportion to their size—to tackle the demanding rhyme scheme of the villanelle in the 'new' portion of his 'New and Selected.' Curiously, though, Orr has remained much the same obsessive, slyly meditative poet, but one who, thankfully, has opted not to write the same poem again and again. Or at least not in the same way. He's still preoccupied with mortality and renewal, themes he was pretty much consigned to with his accidental fatal shooting of his brother at the age of 12, followed not long after by the death of his mother. Growth has just meant a continuous distancing from those experiences, even as he writes about them—and everything else—more explicitly, the hard-to-decipher parables giving way to a quietly observed naturalism." —New York Times Book Review
"Orr is the Accomplished Poet par excellence with an eye as sharp as Seamus Heaney's." —David Wilson
"A reader unfamiliar with Orr's work may be surprised, at first, by the richness of both action and visual details that his succinct, spare poems convey. Lyricism can erupt in the midst of desolation." —Boston Globe
"Orr's poems have always had the stunning ability to place mindfulness almost instantly back inside the mind. Once again, a river inhabits its true banks, and a soul its boundless person." —Naomi Shihab Nye
Orr's gripping chronicle of his troubled boyhood is alternately self-conscious, moving and revelatory. When he was a boy growing up in New York's Hudson River valley, Gregory accidentally shot and killed his younger brother Peter during a hunting excursion with their father, a philandering, amphetamine-addicted country doctor. Now in his fifties, Orr examines the corrosive effect of that loss on his parents' marriage, the divine purpose of such loss, his destiny and the reason for his own survival amid a series of misadventures, which include the family's sudden relocation to rural Haiti and Orr's harrowing participation in civil rights activities in Mississippi in 1965. Upon Orr's return from the Deep South, where he was imprisoned by local authorities, his high school English teacher took him for a walk through the David Smith fields near Lake George. Smith, the great American sculptor who had just died in a car accident, filled the fields in Bolton Landing, N.Y., with gigantic metal sculptures. Orr saw in them images of his own "martyr's cross... alchemized and shining, metamorphosed... into a hundred expressive shapes.... Here was my blessing." And there, a writer was born. Orr's understanding of the tragic events of his life through the prism of art allows him to find serenity and stability (a well-published poet, Orr currently edits the Virginia Quarterly Review). One can only wonder what the next installment of Orr's life will look like on paper, for this one never fails to entertain, mystify and surprise. (Sept.) Forecast: As an independent, Council Oak may not have the resources to mount a major advertising and promotional campaign, other than campus and bookstore readings and an author tour. But strong reviews and word-of-mouth might make the difference in getting this book the attention it deserves. Look for an interview with Orr in a September issue of PW. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
An astounding memoir saturated with themes of death, shame, and guilt, The Blessing focuses on the six years in Orr's life that most affected him and his evolution as a poet. From the earliest chapters, which detail the author's 12th year and the events leading to his accidental shooting of his younger brother, to his later search for meaning and his participation in the Civil Rights Movement, Orr's psychological and emotional honesty is moving. It is his realization that art can be immortal that compels him to reach out of his misery-induced isolation to connect with the world and find meaning. Poetry as Survival reiterates the themes of Orr's memoir on a less personal and more scholarly level. Here he explores the function of poetry as a method for transcending pain and creating order out of the chaos of life. The scope of the discussion of poetry, with analysis of the works of Keats, Dickinson, and Whitman as well as ancient Egyptian poems and Inuit songs, is broad and is peppered with psychological theory. Well researched and fluidly written, this work may prove difficult for the casual reader but is essential for all academic collections. The Blessing is highly recommended for all libraries.-Paolina Taglienti, New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
The inadvertent shooting death of his brother by poet Orr gives this memoir a godawful specific gravity and spurs the author's search for ways to live on. It was an accident, but Orr was at the trigger when a bullet killed his brother Peter. It would shred any web of life's meaning that Orr, then 12, might have been weaving as a young man. No one was there to help him knit his life back together, or to hold and forgive him. His parents were too remote, an already unhappy mother and an amphetamine-powered father who never spoke of the incident. The act was absolute and ineradicable, and Orr dropped into a terrible, desolate free fall. Acknowledgement and forgiveness wouldn't be forthcoming-ever-and Orr was left with no map to guide him through his grief and shame. More misery follows: his father leaving home, his mother dying of an infection while the family is in Haiti, the appearance of the dreaded Inga, his father's girlfriend, in the Orr household. Trying to come to terms with the spiky wheel of fate, Orr has the good luck to become rapt by poetry ("I was enthralled by the possibility of making my own paths out of language") to create his own world. He also flirts with the idea of martyrdom, exiting his torment and confusion as a Freedom Rider, and very nearly gets his wish. As dreadful as is his brutalization in the South, Orr emerges with a renewed respect for living, but it isn't until a reunion with a high school teacher who brings him to the ironworks of the then recently deceased sculptor David Smith that Orr makes a significant commitment against oblivion. Writing has sustained him, "words rhythmically compressed into meaning." Here, the old and new meanings of "blessing"-tosprinkle with blood, to confer spiritual power-harrowingly collide.
