The Cloister Walk

Table of Contents

“
The Cloister Walk
is a new opportunity to discover a remarkable
writer with a huge, wise heart. . . . Norris resonates deeply for a lot
of people: She's one of those writers who demands to be handed
around. You want to share this great discovery, giving her work as
a gift—or you simply shove a copy in the face of a friend, saying,
‘Read
this.' ”

“A deeply moving encounter with the heart and mind of a writer
devoted to the highest level of inquiry.”

“The allure of the monastic life baffles most laypeople, but Norris
goes far in explaining it. . . . What emerges, finally, is an affecting
portrait—one of the most vibrant since Merton's—of the misunderstood,
often invisible world of the monastics.”

“Norris presents ample proof that holy people don't have to be
starchy . . . If you learn anything from
The Cloister Walk
, it's that
monks are people too. They gossip, crack jokes, fall asleep in
church, suffer through depression and doubt like the rest of us. On
the other hand, if Norris has accomplished what she sets out to
do, you'll close the book feeling just the slightest bit holier yourself.
. . . It's hard not to admire Norris's determination to rediscover
monastic principles and try to explain them to a world that
often seems godless, bereft of spirituality. And it's instructive, even
inspiring at times, to see how she applies what she's learned to
everything she does. Perhaps there's hope for spiritual life outside
the cloister after all.”

“Luminous . . . Norris's feel for the poetry she finds in the liturgy
is one of the most potent parts of the book.”

“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.”

“Norris . . . acts as a sympathetic and perceptive outsider. . . . A
down-to-earth and accessible introduction to a powerful tradition.”

“[
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.”

“Norris . . . acts as a sympathetic and perceptive outsider. . . . A
down-to-earth and accessible introduction to a powerful tradition.”

“[
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

Kathleen Norris
is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of the
New York Times
best-sellers
The Cloister Walk
and
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
. Norris has also published seven books of poetry. A popular speaker, she is an editor at large at the
Christian Century
. A recipient of grants from the Bush and Guggenheim foundations, she has been in residence twice at the Collegeville Institute at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and is an oblate of Assumption Abbey in North Dakota. She divides her time between Hawaii and South Dakota.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leaving New York
(editor)