An acclaimed poet's "gripping" memoir of an accidental tragedy, a childhood haunted by guilt, and a quest to find healing through art ( Publishers Weekly).
When Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. From the immediate aftermath-a period of shock, sadness, and isolation-it quickly became clear that support and guidance would not be coming from his distant mother. Nor would it come from his father, a philandering country doctor addicted to amphetamines. Left to his own devices, the boy suffered.
Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. As a young man, his feelings and a growing sense of idealism prompted him to activism in the civil rights movement, where he marched and was imprisoned, and then scarred again by a terrifying abduction. Eventually, Orr's experiences led him to understand that art, particularly poetry, could work as a powerful source of healing and meaning to combat the trauma he carried.
Throughout The Blessing, Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art.
"Even a chaotic and hapless family, it seems, can confer a blessing-the strength to live in the world as it is, and the wisdom to love people as they are. The book is not so much about surviving pain so much as developing a writer's instinct for transforming it." -Kathleen Norris, New York Times-bestselling author of The Cloister Walk

Gregory Orr is the author of more than ten collections of poems, including, most recently, The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write. He is also the author of several volumes of essays, criticism, and memoir, including Poetry as Survival and A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry. Orr is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for The Blessing. Orr was the founder and director of the MFA Program in Writing at the University of Virginia, and the longtime poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Contents

Part One
Blessing
Guns
The Accident
Meanings
Child Mind
Numb
The Field
Cain Continuing

Part Two
Alcove
Renssalaerville
Germantown
The Ditch
House Calls
Bottles
Books
New Heights
The Chiron

Part Three
After
Returning
A Dream
The Old House
Visitors
Plans
Haiti
My Mother's Letters
The Paths
Voodun
Last Letter
The Operation
Leaving
The Green Bird

Part Four
Back to Germantown
Inga
School
The Maidens of Hades
The Thread of Poetry
The Excursion
College
Aftermath
Mississippi
Jackson
After the Long Day
Hayneville
Safe and Sound
The Other Field