With a new preface by Sharon Olds
Those who have traveled know the experience of extended time and sharpened perception. Muriel Rukeyser's account of Puck Fair — the last existing pagan festival of the goat — captures just that state of consciousness. Set in County Kerry, Ireland, The Orgy evokes this great American poet's journey of sensual and psychological transformation in the midst of a lush account of Irish culture and tradition
"Brilliant … full of vivid language and people half embarrassed, half excited, swept up in a mixture of Guinness and the sheer glamour of a ritual which has come from wilder, pre-Christian times."
— The Observer
"The Orgy has … enlarged the meaning of 'luminous.'"
— The American Scholar
"A true delight."
— Kay Boyle
"The Orgy is … a prayer about how to shape one's life. It is about blood lines and sympathy lines, about war and sexual war, about peace and the sexual dance…. It is a message in a bottle — a brilliant packet of messages in a far-traveled bottle."
— Sharon Olds, from the preface to The Orgy
"Haunting…. The author may have left a few sore bones behind her in Ireland, where we do not relish having the exact nature and extent of our festivities described in cold print. But she has an honest and inquiring mind. She didn't agree with the Irish woman who thought that, after America, everything in Ireland must look shabby. No, said Muriel Rukeyser, Ireland looks real. This American poet has a quick eye, too, for the things I find I love: the moon over Dublin and the mythic Post Office; the eternal fisherman casting a fly over the River Laune; the fuchsia blossoms that are the 'tears of Kerry.'"
— New York Times Book Review
"Beauty and power and imagination…."
— Joseph Heller
"Ecstatic."
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"An extraordinary experience. The book is a jewel and a flame."
— Hiram Haydn
"I was enchanted."
— Ella Winter
"In The Orgy Muriel Rukeyser shows a woman arriving at a place and time where the truths and lies of her life are open to revelation. In this sensual documentary, this filmic, acutely observed narrative, unfolding over three days, the reader, like the poet, is swept from observer into participant in 'a whole new world.'"
— Adrienne Rich
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