The Blessing: A Memoir (review)

When he was twelve years old, Gregory Orr shot his brother to death in a hunting accident. This event shaped his life, not only in the Hudson River Valley of New York, where he grew up with a cold, distant mother and a philandering country-doctor father addicted to amphetamines, but also when the family moved to Haiti, where his mother died of complications arising from what was supposed to have been a simple D&C, and later, in the deep South, where Orr as a young civil rights worker was imprisoned and beaten.

It's an interesting story; but as Frank Conroy said, "Life happens to all of us; art answers back." The real story in Gregory Orr's memoir, The Blessing, is Orr's discovery of the saving power of language, and it's the author's use of language that enables him to unpack the complex and ambivalent feelings we so often stuff into one trunk labeled Grief. Perhaps more than any other emotion, grief is both private and universal: private both in the sense that it is neither quantifiable nor comparable, and also in the way it isolates the grief-stricken from the rest of the world; universal in that we're all grieving over some loss, perhaps beginning from the moment we're weaned from our mother's breast. What makes Orr's memoir more accessible to the general reader than many other accounts of trauma and recovery is his poet's ability to use metaphor, allusion, and symbol to shape – and universalize – his private agony.

Orr brings to his memoir the lyric sensibilities of an acclaimed author of eight volumes of poetry. His metaphors are extended and complex. For example, discovering poetry was for the young Gregory Orr, silently grieving the memory of having killed his brother, a "precious thread" by which, like Theseus, he might find his way "out of the labyrinth of [his] . . . own consciousness." I expected the image of the thread to stop there, but Orr goes on to develop this image of poetry as thread, first by explaining the ways he is not like Theseus, nor Ariadne, and then explaining how this thread that is poetry is sometimes

the thinnest silk filament, so fine it almost cut my palm simply resting there. Other times, it thickened and became slick as if with blood. . . . Other times, it became braided and dry as a rope and I wondered if I were meant to twist it round my neck. . . . And sometimes it seemed a woman's hair as impossibly long and fragrant as Rapunzel's.

The Blessing is filled with such extended metaphors: grief is a giant hand sweeping "the counters and dice of a child's game off the board"; his mother is a tree ("I'm too small to climb her trunk and she's unbending, oblivious, her arms as unreaching, unreachable as distant branches"); horror is a place where "the clock stops entirely and I'm trapped inside the screaming, silent terror again."

Allusion is another way Orr concentrates the complexities of grief. A major cause of young Gregory's rage and despair in the wake of killing his brother was conventional religious thinking: "Peter is in heaven with Jesus . . . it's all part of God's plan." Yet Judeo-Christian mythology was also a way for the author to describe his journey out of that rage and despair. The word "blessing" itself has for most readers religious connotations. For Orr, the word has multiple meanings – "to wound, to confer spiritual power, to sprinkle with blood" [author's italics] – and it is in the "intersection" of these meanings that the mystery of Peter's death is revealed both to young Gregory and to the reader. In similar fashion, Orr explores the meaning of the mark of Cain, which, in its dark way, sustained him through the first years after the accident.

More frequent are the author's classical allusions. Chapter 34, "School," an extended analogy of school to the medieval church, is followed by a chapter...