The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [1]
—Molly McQuade, Chicago Tribune
“The Cloister Walk is nothing less than a gift of insight borne by
the spare words of a careful artist . . . [It] is one of those rare books
too rich to race through. It will feed a reader’s mind more fully if
it is read like daily passages of scripture in a lectionary.”
—Kansas City Star
“Norris . . . acts as a sympathetic and perceptive outsider. . . . A
down-to-earth and accessible introduction to a powerful tradition.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Dakota] was a lyrical, documentary homage to a place, but also
a modest, telling insistence on immanence . . . [Norris] paid attention
with knowing devotion to a social and moral landscape;
gave grateful respect to the individuals who have clung to it, often
against great odds; and rendered what she had witnessed with a
meditative intensity and originality worthy of James Agee’s response
over a half-century ago to Hale County, Alabama, or
William Carlos Williams’s extended examination in verse of Paterson,
New Jersey—a tradition of watchfulness and evocation
that in form defies literary genres and in content mixes concrete
description with spells of soulful inwardness suggestively put into
words. In The Cloister Walk, persisting in her wonderfully idiosyncratic
ways, she gives us the result of an ‘immersion into a liturgical
world’. . . . In these last years of the second millennium, when
whirl and whim rule, when there is so much snide and sneering cynicism
around (in politics, in the arts, in criticism) . . . talented visionaries
[such as Norris] point us in another direction: toward an
embrace of moral and spiritual contemplation—one that is blessedly
free of the pietistic self-righteousness increasingly prominent
in our present-day civic life.”
—Robert Coles, The New York Times Book Review
“When several years ago I read Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, poet
Kathleen Norris’s first prose book, I was struck by her apparent reinvention
of nonfiction. Little writing that is published now can truly
be called new. . . . Yet Norris reminded me then, and still reminds
me now, that some new things may remain to be done with facts
and with words. . . . [In The Cloister Walk] Norris continues to write
plain-spoken meditations that expand the purview of nonfiction. . . .
She writes about religion with the imagination of a poet. She broadens
any theme, no matter how narrow; she never preaches. She also
writes with a refreshing sense of worldly attachment. The sturdiness
of her writing style complements a sturdiness of spiritual outlook
honed on humility and liberated by her mischievous sense of
humor. . . . In reading Norris, one comes to feel like a spiritual
collaborator and, when one’s spirit fails, like a spiritual rebel.”
—Molly McQuade, Chicago Tribune
“The Cloister Walk is nothing less than a gift of insight borne by
the spare words of a careful artist . . . [It] is one of those rare books
too rich to race through. It will feed a reader’s mind more fully if
it is read like daily passages of scripture in a lectionary.”
—Kansas City Star
“Norris . . . acts as a sympathetic and perceptive outsider. . . . A
down-to-earth and accessible introduction to a powerful tradition.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Dakota] was a lyrical, documentary homage to a place, but also
a modest, telling insistence on immanence . . . [Norris] paid attention
with knowing devotion to a social and moral landscape;
gave grateful respect to the individuals who have clung to it, often
against great odds; and rendered what she had witnessed with a
meditative intensity and originality worthy of James Agee’s response
over a half-century ago to Hale County, Alabama, or
William Carlos Williams’s extended examination in verse of Paterson,
New Jersey—a tradition of watchfulness and evocation
that in form defies literary genres and in content mixes concrete
description with spells of soulful inwardness suggestively put into
words. In The Cloister Walk, persisting in her