‘Blue Heron’ Is A Revelation

“Autobiography,” the critic John Berger said, “begins with a sense of being alone. It’s an orphan form.” Berger wrote these words weeks after the death of his mother, but he was speaking generally, about the project of remembrance which so many artists take up over the course of their lives. That loneliness—that orphanhood—is a matter of separation, a gap between the self as subject and author. We