Overview
The blood that would first stain Orr's childhood was spilled the year he was twelve. In that autumn, Gregory Orr shot his brother to death in a hunting accident. In this spare and poignant memoir, he tells how this horrific event shaped his life. Against backdrops of the rural Hudson Valley, a remote charity hospital in the jungles of Haiti, and the Deep South of the civil rights era where he marched and bled with other youthful demonstrators, Orr articulates his journey in language as sharp-edged and authentic as the experiences themselves.At his brother's funeral he saw "... that death was with us. It was the small white snail of wadded Kleenex my mother kept pressing against her face; it was nibbling holes in her cheek as if it were a leaf." No comfort would come from Orr's beloved though distant mother or his father, a quixotic country doctor addicted to amphetamines. He would have to make sense of life's inchoate forces on his own. Eventually, his experiences would lead him to an unexpected epiphany and a clear answer to one of life's basic questions: How do we find meaning in the face of death?
Synopsis
Filled with the spare and moving language that marks Gregory Orr's most affecting poems, The Blessing explores themes of personal tragedy and atonement, trauma and reconciliation. Orr's ability to give voice to the feelings that are hardest to put into words makes his story unforgettable, mesmerizing reading.
About the Author
Gregory Orr is the critically acclaimed author of eight volumes of poetry, including The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems, and Poetry as Survival, a book about healing trauma through poetry. Orr teaches at the University of Virginia and edits poetry for the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He has been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Violence, and is also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts and Gugenheim Fellowships. Orr lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and two daughters
Publishers Weekly
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.