| Title | : | This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 19792012 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1619021986 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781619021983 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 404 |
| Publication | : | First published September 16, 2013 |
There are poems of spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics that include some of the most beautiful domestic poems in American literature, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials.
With the publication of this new complete edition, it is becoming increasingly clear that The Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s entire work. And these magnificent poems, taken as a whole, have become one of the greatest contributions ever made to American poetry.
This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 19792012 Reviews
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It was very hard to pick a favorite poem from this beautiful book. I choose 3 to add, this was a perfect book to read with everything that is going on in the world right now.
What do the tall trees say
To the late havocs in the sky?
They sigh.
The air moves, and they sway.
When the breeze on the hill
Is still, they they stand still.
They wait.
They have no fear. Their fate
Is faith. Birdsong
Is all they've wanted, all along.
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Off in the woods in the quiet
morning a redbird is singing
and his song goes out around him
greater than its purpose,
a welcoming room of song
in which the trees stand,
through which the creek flows.
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p. 261
I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.
I have no love
except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind. -
Summary: A compilation of several volumes of Berry’s sabbath poems.
We learn in the preface and introduction to these poems that they were composed by Wendell Berry during his Sabbaths, which he observed each Sunday. He tells us that many of them were written out of doors. Some of the poems even record Berry reclining in the woods near his home and falling asleep. Some, as the introductory poem suggests, were written looking out the window from his study, looking down the sloping property that is his farm to the river that flows into the Ohio.
He records the work of caring for the healing of his sloping lands. He writes in the introduction of having hoped the pasture would revert to forest, but rather his ewes ate the tree saplings. Instead, he tends the pasture in 2005, X “Mowing the hillside pasture–where.” He describes the Queen Anne’s lace, the milkweeds, butterflies, voles, and the contours of the healing slopes for which “He sweats and gives thanks.” In the next poem he speaks of imparting these experiences to his grandson, remembering when he was the young boy waving to an old workman in a pasture.
It is little wonder with someone so committed to the attentive care of his land that many of the poems celebrate the wonders he observes on his farm or the neighboring woods and streams. In 1998, IV, “The woods and pastures are joyous” describes the coming of another spring, the sheep and cattle “like souls in bliss,” the abundant growth and birdsong, and asks, “Who now can believe in winter? In winter who could have hoped for this?”
It also wouldn’t be Wendell Berry if he weren’t decrying the destruction of the land. His poems of 2007 describe this and his struggle to hold onto hope. He returns to his own land and finds hope amid the hopelessness in the renewal of life he witnesses.
Some of the poems are in the voice of characters from his novels, the Port William Membership, including Andy Catlett, Burley Coulter, and Jayber Crow. In others, he speaks of himself in the third person, as in 2011, VII,”A man who loves the trees” where he walks among his “elders” when he sees “a dogwood flower-white lighting all the woods.” In some, he adopts the voice of the Mad Farmer, as in the concluding poem of the collection, 2012, XXI, “As a child, the Mad Farmer saw easily” recounting the captivating vision of the star and the angelic host announcing the Christ child to shepherds that captivated him as a child, fading in the horrors of modernity and fears for what is to come. Yet as a pilgrim, “He sets out.”
I was surprised by the number of poems remembering friends who have died and reflecting on his own advancing years. In 2005, VII, Berry makes an observation that would find many of us nodding our heads in agreement: “I know I am getting old and I say so/but I don’t think of myself as an old man./I think of myself as a young man/with unforeseen debilities.”
Some of the most touching poems are those marking anniversaries and talking about what it is like for two people to love one another in all the ways couples love for many years. He celebrates the power of the marriage vow in 2009, VI “Our vow is the plumb line.” It is a line that seems to separate as both speak, “but vanishing as only we two know when we indeed are one.”
A final theme recurring in many poems is Berry’s piety. He doesn’t “wear this on his sleeve,” filling his poems with references to faith, When he speaks, it is powerful as in these six lines from 2005, I:
"I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.
I have no love
except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind."
Berry advises, “I hope some readers will read them as they were written: slowly, and with more patience than effort.” A friend who has read this collected comments that she loved taking these on sabbath walks, and reading and pondering one each sabbath. That may be a good approach to these poems that direct our thoughts to the most important matters of our lives as well as the sheer wonder amid which we move, that we often miss in our distraction and hurry. But then, is this not why we sabbath? -
A dense and beautiful collection of poems that perfectly encapsulate all the things that make Wendell Berry such an approachable and timeless poet. He repeats themes a lot, but never presents them in a way that feels redundant. He lets his passions and frustrations and fears shine, and reading his work—especially out loud—is a meditative and almost healing. You can’t help but hear the sounds of nature while reading Berry’s work.
Berry might not be the most profound or technically stunning of poets—although I’d never admit to being able to define what those traits should even look like—but he is a master of voice and tone and lures his reader in with an air of simplicity and then traps them with his layered and complex thematics. There were countless times throughout this collection where a poem would gently take me by the hand, walk me through it’s beautiful language, and then sucker punch me with a final, decisive line or stanza that left me reeling. That’s the beauty of Berry’s poetry.
I can’t recommend this book enough. -
You can almost smell the earth and hear the bird song. Honest. Tender. Observant. Measured. Connected. Wendell Berry is so full of love and respect for God's creation and his own small place in it.
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They span the years 1979 to 2013. For all those years the poet Wendell Berry has been in the habit of taking solitary Sunday walks around his farm and holdings in Kentucky. And in the habit of writing poems about what he saw and experienced on those walks. The result is an impressively extensive body of work called Sabbath Poems. They're published in their entirety as This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979-2013.
These are all relatively short poems. They're meditative and Thoreau-like. They're pastoral, nature-conscious, and, as you might expect, observant of every personality of the seasons, aware of every type of wingbeat and footpad of life there. These poems are always sensitive to the passage of time, and they're modest and grateful for the world. In recent years the poems have become more spiritual. Thinking about Berry's awareness of and ability to articulate the wholeness of existence, it's no wonder he's been compared to the great Roman poet Horace.
This is a remarkable sequence of poems. This is the kind of volume you want to keep nearby so as to be able to open it frequently and be brought back into contact with Berry's easy comfort in the world. He writes about his home in Kentucky, but the specific location doesn't matter because it's everywhere. -
I can't sit down and consume a lot of these at one time. But every time I open this book there are treasures galore. 34 years of Sabbath reflections. Whether he called it that or not, Berry is no stranger to the rhythms of rest. Marvelous insight set to poetry. Excellent material for weekly, monthly, or annual readings.
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I’ve spent every morning with this book over the past 2 months. It’s become an incredibly special and important book to me. These poems were breath. They’ve slowed me down. They’ve helped me rest. They’ve carried me into healing spaces in my own writing. I’ll be coming back to these always. This book will be one I’ll be holding onto for the long haul
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It is mildly rrdiculous for a reader to give "stars" for a rating to a book of poems as wonderful as this one. But I do, hoping others will follow the stars to the poet and learn from him, as I have.
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If you're going to have a book of Wendell Berry poems, this is it.
And Lord have mercy, is it worth having. Berry's writing is earthy and grounded, spirit-filled and elegiac, radiant with an honest, dirt-under-the-fingernails love of creation. The poems themselves are almost entirely wonderful. Some are personal, more are economic, several are political. Most are songs to life and field and forest, a that hard, slower, more rooted sense of being human that we now have mostly forgotten.
A few are so filled with glory...like the poem A Timbered Choir...that the hairs on my arm stand on end and I tremble a little in the reading, as one does when one is growing dangerously close to the Holy.
I love this book. -
Thanks to Goodreads, I know I’ve spent nearly 18 months with these poems, and they truly ushered in so much Sabbath in that time.
I realize not every poem in the collection is a 5-star one, but I give 5 stars to this incredible tribute to the growth of a man, a mind, a voice, a message. I think the crowning achievement is toward the end—“The Book of Camp Branch” which I would like to memorize, and which I suspect is a sister poem to Berry’s book of essays Standing By Words (coming up this year in my apprenticeship!). -
This collection of poems was stellar. I read a poem a day for quite some time and I'm so grateful for Wendell Berry and his artful way of voicing his thoughts. His care toward the world and environment are so obvious and I appreciate his love of simplicity and the beauty that can be found in it. I will miss starting every day with one of his poems from this beautiful collection and would recommend this book to any and all readers.
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When I was younger, I discovered this poet, and marveled at how much his poetry spoke to me, a southern farmer born before my parents, and me a wandering gypsy in love with the world: and that is our connection. In this collection, he is open and honest and angry and religious; but speaks of the light and trees like I feel of the light and trees. A lot of poems were about farming and tilling the land; and a lot were about religion; and a lot about conservation, but through it all, he writes poems about his wife and kids and grandchildren and it is all woven with the light of nature, of the earth, of simplicity and complexity paired with mindfulness. Beautiful.
Nature of course includes damage as a part of her wholeness. Her creatures live only by the deaths of other creatures. Wind, flood, and fire are as much her means of world-making as birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. She destroys and she heals. Her ways are cyclic, but she is absolutely original. She never exactly repeats herself, and this is the source equally of our grief and our delight. But Nature’s damages are followed by her healings, though not necessarily on a human schedule or in human time.
That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.
He is a tree of a sort, rooted in the dark, aspiring to the light, dependent on both. His poems are leavings, sheddings, gathered from the light, as it has come, and offered to the dark, which he believes must shine with sight, with light, dark only to him.
He sets out at times without even a path or any guidance other than knowledge of the place and himself as they were in time already past. He goes among trees, climbing again the one hill of his life. With his hand full of words he goes into the wordless, wording it barely in time as he passes. One by one he places words, balancing on each as on a small stone in the swift flow
1979 I I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it. It sings, and I hear its song. Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song. After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns...
here nothing grieves In the risen season. Past life Lives in the living. Resurrection Is in the way each maple leaf Commemorates its kind, by connection Outreaching understanding. What rises Rises into comprehension And beyond. Even falling raises In praise of light. What is begun Is unfinished. And so the mind That comes to rest among the bluebells Comes to rest in motion, refined By alteration. The bud swells, Opens, makes seed, falls, is well, Being becoming what it is: Miracle and parable Exceeding thought, because it is Immeasurable; the understander Encloses understanding.
To sit and look at light-filled leaves May let us see, or seem to see, Far backward as through clearer eyes To what unsighted hope believes:
Whatever is foreseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day,
Foredooms the body to the use of light, Light into light returning, as the stream Of days flows downward through us into night, And into light and life and time to come.
The year drives on toward what it will become.
To long for what eternity fulfills Is to forsake the light one has, or wills To have, and go into the dark, to wait What light may come—no light perhaps, the dark Insinuates. And yet the dark conceals All possibilities: thought, word, and light, Air, water, earth, motion, and song, the arc Of lives through light, eyesight, hope, rest, and work—
Such a bliss Of bloom’s no ornament, but root And light, a saving loveliness, Starred firmament here underfoot.
Thrush song, stream song, holy love That flows through earthly forms and folds, The song of Heaven’s Sabbath fleshed In throat and ear, in stream and stone, A grace living here as we live, Move my mind now to that which holds Things as they change. The warmth has come. The doors have opened. Flower and song Embroider ground and air, lead me Beside the healing field that waits; Growth, death, and a restoring form Of human use will make it well. But I go on, beyond, higher In the hill’s fold, forget the time I come from and go to, recall This grove left out of all account...
Beyond all history that he knows, Where trees like great saints stand in time, Eternal in their patience.
Estranged by distance, he relearns The way to quiet not his own, The light at rest on tree and stone, The high leaves falling in their turns, Spiraling through the air made gold By their slow fall. Bright on the ground, They wait their darkening, commend To coming light the light they hold.
The sky bright after summer-ending rain, I sat against an oak half up the climb. The sun was low; the woods was hushed in shadow; Now the long shimmer of the crickets’ song Had stopped. I looked up to the westward ridge And saw the ripe October light again, Shining through leaves still green yet turning gold. Those glowing leaves made of the light a place That time and leaf would leave. The wind came cool, And then I knew that I was present in The long age of the passing world, in which I once was not, now am, and will not be, And in that time, beneath the changing tree, I rested.
Remember the small secret creases of the earth—the grassy, the wooded, the rocky—that the water has made, finding its way. Remember the voices of the water flowing. Remember the water flowing under the shadows of the trees, of the tall grasses, of the stones. Remember the water striders walking over the surface of the water as it flowed. Remember the great sphere of the small wren’s song, through which the water flowed and the light fell. Remember, and come to rest in light’s ordinary miracle.
Go by the narrow road Along the creek, a burrow Under shadowy trees Such as a mouse makes through Tall grass, so that you may Forget the wide road you Have left behind, and all That it has led to. Or, Best, walk up through the woods, Around the valley rim, And down to where the trees Give way to cleared hillside, So that you reach the place Out of the trees’ remembrance Of their kind; seasonal And timeless, they stand in Uncounted time,
Loving you has taught me the infinite longing of the self to be given away and the great difficulty of that entire giving, for in love to give is to receive and then there is yet more to give; and others have been born of our giving to whom the self, greatened by gifts, must be given, and by that giving be increased, until, self-burdened, the self, staggering upward in years, in fear, hope, love, and sorrow, imagines, rising like a moon, a pale moon risen in daylight over the dark woods, the Self whose gift we and all others are, the self that is by definition given.
Finally will it not be enough, after much living, after much love, after much dying of those you have loved, to sit on the porch near sundown with your eyes simply open, watching the wind shape the clouds into the shapes of clouds? Even then you will remember the history of love, shaped in the shapes of flesh, ever changing as the clouds that pass, the blessed yearning of body for body, unending light. You will remember, watching the clouds, the future of love.
Or I give myself to gravity, light, and air and am carried back to solitary work in fields and woods, where my hands rest upon a world unnamed, complete, unanswerable, and final as our daily bread and meat. The way of love leads all ways to life beyond words, silent and secret. To serve that triumph I have done all the rest.
Now you know the worst we humans have to know about ourselves, and I am sorry, for I know that you will be afraid. To those of our bodies given without pity to be burned, I know there is no answer but loving one another, even our enemies, and this is hard. But remember: when a man of war becomes a man of peace, he gives a light, divine though it is also human. When a man of peace is killed by a man of war, he gives a light. You do not have to walk in darkness. If you will have the courage for love, you may walk in light. It will be the light of those who have suffered for peace.
I stood still a long time for fear that any sound I made would cause that flood of light, which was singing which was light, to flow away forever from this flawed world.
There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place.
There is a place you can go where you are quiet, a place of water and the light on the water. Trees are there, leaves, and the light on leaves moved by air. Birds, singing, move among leaves, in leaf shadow. After many years you have come to no thought of these, but they are themselves your thoughts. There seems to be little to say, less and less. Here they are. Here you are. Here as though gone. None of us stays, but in the hush where each leaf in the speech of leaves is a sufficient syllable the passing light finds out surpassing freedom of its way.
I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will.
The spring woods hastening now To overshadow him, He’s passing in to where He can’t see out. It charms Mere eyesight to believe The nearest thing not trees Is the sky, into which The trees reach, opening Their luminous new leaves. Burdened only by A weightless shawl of shade The lighted leaves let fall, He seems to move within A form unpatterned to His eye or mind, design Betokened to his thought By leafshapes tossed about. Ways indescribable By human tongue or hand Seem tangled here, and yet Are brought to light, are brought To life, and thought finds rest Beneath a brightened tree.
We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see Ahead, but looking back the very light That blinded us shows us the way we came, Along which blessings now appear, risen As if from sightlessness to sight, and we, By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward The blesséd light that yet to us is dark.
Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
The trees rise in silence almost natural, but not quite, almost eternal, but not quite. What more did I think I wanted? Here is what has always been. Here is what will always be. Even in me, the Maker of all this returns in rest, even to the slightest of His works, a yellow leaf slowly falling, and is pleased.
When we convene again to understand the world, the first speaker will again point silently out the window at the hillside in its season, sunlit, under the snow, and we will nod silently, and silently stand and go.
The sun Comes from the dark, it lights The always passing river, Shines on the great-branched tree, And goes. Longing and dark, We are completely filled With breath of love, in us Forever incomplete.
I know for a while again the health of self-forgetfulness, looking out at the sky through a notch in the valley side, the black woods wintry on the hills, small clouds at sunset passing across. And I know that this is one of the thresholds between Earth and Heaven, from which even I may step forth from my self and be free.
Some had derided him As unadventurous, For he would not give up What he had vowed to keep. But what he vowed to keep Even his keeping changed And, changing, led him far Beyond what they or he Foresaw, and made him strange. What he had vowed to keep He lost, of course, and yet Kept in his heart. The things He vowed to keep, the things He had in keeping changed, The things lost in his keeping That he kept in his heart, These were his pilgrimage, Were his adventure, near And far, at home and in The world beyond this world.
To the abandoned fields The trees returned and grew. They stand and grow. Time comes To them, time goes, the trees Stand; the only place They go is where they are. These wholly patient ones Who only stand and wait For time to come to them, Who do not go to time, Stand in eternity.
Ask the world to reveal its quietude— not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
The wind of the fall is here. It is everywhere. It moves every leaf of every tree. It is the only motion of the river. Green leaves grow weary of their color. Now evening too is in the air.
We come at last to the dark and enter in. We are given bodies newly made out of their absence from one another in the light of the ordinary day. We come to the space between ourselves, the narrow doorway, and pass through into the land of the wholly loved.
The light flows toward the earth, the river toward the sea, and these do not change. The air changes, as the mind changes at a word from the light, a flash from the dark.
this is the river of the birth of my mind and inspiration, my watching many years here where I have made my toils. And now I must imagine it rising, light drawn, invisibly up into the air.
Leave your windows and go out, people of the world, go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods and along the streams. Go together, go alone. Say no to the Lords of War which is Money which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees, yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds and the animals and every living thing, yes to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.
In sleep The dreamer wakes. He sees Above the stars the deep Of Heaven opened. Is
He living, then, his part Of Heaven’s earthly life? And what shall be the art By which this sight can live?
They come singly, the little streams, Out of their solitude. They bear In their rough fall a spate of gleams That glance and dance in morning air. They come singly, and coming go Ever downward toward the river Into whose dark abiding flow They come, now quieted, together. In dark they mingle and are made At one with light in highest flood Embodied and inhabited, The budded branch as red as blood.
The window again welcomes in the light of lengthening days. The river in its old groove passes again beneath opening leaves. In their brevity, between cold and shade, flowers again brighten the woods floor. This then may be the prayer without ceasing, this beauty and gratitude, this moment.
I built a timely room beside the river, The slope beneath descending to the water. Some mornings it is vibrant with the glance Of sunlight brightened on the little waves The wind drives shoreward, stirring leaves and branches Over the roof also. It is a room Of pictures and of memories of some Who are no more in time, and of the absent And of the present the unresting thoughts. It is a room as timely as the body, As frail, to shelter love’s eternal work, Always unfinished, here at water’s edge, The work of beauty, faith, and gratitude Eternally alive in time.
Camp Branch, my native stream, forever unreturning flows from the town down to Cane Run which flows to the river. It is my native descent, my native walk, my native thought that stays and goes, passing ever downward toward the sea. Its sound is a song that flings up light to the undersides of leaves. Its song and light are a way of walking, a way of thought moved by sound and sight. -
A little more than a decade ago I read A Timbered Choir, Berry's first collection of Sabbath Poems. They didn't stick with my quite as well as the poems in his earlier Collected Poems did, but I still gathered some favourites from them.
This is an updated collection of Sabbath poems that includes all of A Timbered Choir and more Sabbath poems written since then, up through 2012. Noticeable in this volume are Berry's reactions to the Iraq War years.
Berry's more recent poems continue his normal themes--care of the land, reflecting on marriage, criticizing our culture's faults. Added to that are ruminations on aging. I don't think that the more recent poems are as creatively powerful as the earlier ones, but they are interesting insights on life from one of our wisest people. -
Peaceful, reflective, simple... all like a good Sunday in Kentucky. Berry's sabbaths make you feel as you traversed his plains, hiked in his woods, marveled at nature's dance before his eyes, all wrapped in a reverence of the creator and the occasional disdain for the created who don't share in his gratefulness of the gift of it all. His writing grows more fluid as the years traipse by and the introspection remains consistent. The imagery at times seems so tangible that the reader transports easily to the bluegrass venues that Berry celebrates with, marvels at, and speaks to.
My favorite collection was 2005. -
Starting reading this on the subway; reading the introduction that said that the book is best read in a quiet place in nature. I guess the subway is the second-best place to read this book. I have had the book out in my living room, and friends who have seen it have said they want to read it. Hard to decide where to start in reading Wendell Berry - he has written so much!
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This is the newest edition of Wendell Berry's poems inspired by his solitary Sunday walks around his Kentucky farm, written from 1979 to 2013. Inspirational, filled with spiritual longing, politcs, wonderings at the natural, and human, world...happy, sad, beautiul poems here. Wonderful!
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Wendell Berry writes in his introduction that "the fundamental conflict of our time is that between the creaturely life of Nature’s world and the increasingly mechanical life of modern humans." Many of the poems in this collection explore this conflict, with the mechanical life of modern humans coming in for some harsh criticism. Berry also writes "that one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace." Although a Christian (many of the poems in this collection are specifically so), this idea of the good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods constitute a Sabbath for Berry, one separate from the Sabbath where "On Sunday mornings I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer." Sabbath, in Berry's poetry, is to experience the nature; Sabbath is also community, love between husband and wife, family, and peace on earth, all explored in this collection of poems as well.
In this time of Trump and pandemic, and climate change, Berry is a hard read, because he constantly reminds us through his poems that we can all be doing more and should be doing more to make this world more peaceful, and protect the earth, to be good stewards. We aren't being good stewards; we worship machinery and money rather than appreciating and preserving precious Creation. -
Loved slowly reading this mammoth-sized poetry collection over the last six months! Now I feel like I can finally dive into Berry's other works, because you know I've been stockpiling his books when I find them as soon as I heard what he's about..my man!!
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This is a continual read, here and there, to always bring me back to God’s blessings in the simple things. You feel Berry’s pleasure in nature, the woods especially and forest habitat. The knowledge he has accumulated of the land over time is amazing. I would say that his poems are peaceful and comforting, challenging and clarifying. They are a gift!
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Wendell Berry began writing Sabbath poems in 1979, and the series continues today, in 2020. I return to this volume whenever I need to hear a sane, savoring voice reflecting on life, on Earth, and on perennial human questions about meaning, mortality, holiness, beauty, and love. This man of letters--master of fiction and essay as well as poetry--can be irreverent in his other writing, as in his Mad Farmer poems, but in these pages he is in a reflective mood, aware of the holy presence shimmering around him on his hillside farm, along the banks of the Kentucky River, among his sheep and gardens, in the country of marriage he shares with his beloved Tanya. To sample the full range of his poetry, read his New Collected Poems (Counterpoint Press, 2012). He is one of my touchstones, as writer and human being.
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Wendell Berry might have been described by Thoreau as a 'Sainte-Terrer', a Holy-Lander forever on pilgrimage towards his spiritual home.
Berry's collection of Sabbath poems were written over a lifetime of Sundays while roaming the fields and backwoods of his native Kentucky contemplating themes of nature, community, economics, simplicity, love, life, death and the after life.
Berry is one of the prophetic voices of this generation, a voice calling in the wilderness, "Prepare the way for the Lord." -
I thought this was a great collection of poems with the following being some of the ones that I truly liked:
10, 18, 25, 56, 59, 66, 78, 80, 89
107, 110, 114, 136, 141, 142,
143, 151, 165, 172, 174, 199,
203, 241, 242, 321, 329, 389
However, the thing that I liked the best was in the introduction when I described himself as a foul weather Christian. He said something about wanting to be out in God's creation when the weather was fair and only showed up for church when it was bad. -
Better than the Bible~
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I've been reading one a week or so. Gems
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I will always be reading this book. Beautiful. It gives you a vision and experience of sabbath.
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I took in this book gradually, over time, like weekly walks with a friend or mentor. I’m a huge Wendell Berry fan, and as a writer, I was encouraged by seeing his repetition and growth over the years through the huge span covered in this volume. In the intro he talks about his struggle with the word “spirit” or his struggle to define “wild.”
Berry is a writer who values vocation, and values creation. Some of his poems are angry and disgusted. He gets political at times, but in such a human, grieving way.
Most of the poems are peaceful and content. He reminds me of Churchill as a painter, trying to capture that pond that is so illusive. For Berry it’s the stream, and the birds. He never bores of trying to aptly describe them, from this angle or that. I wonder if sometimes he holds back, for fear of capturing them too well—allowing them their space and freedom—the thing he admires the most about them.
It’s reminded me as a writer that I don’t have to move onto a different subject. I can stay on it awhile, see it from yet another angle. I can write poetry about my kids, my home, my life, not because they’re brilliant, but because holding onto the beauty of the ordinary is where you stumble upon a line or two of words that transcend, or resonate with anyone—or just a neighbor you can bless by them.
Some of my favorite lines:
“They came eager
to their feed, and he who felt
their hunger was by their feeding
eased.”
(2008 describing a shepherd) I can’t get that picture of a shepherd out of my mind, and brought me back to my days with a newborn.)
“The sanity of grief” (2012) those 4 words in a much longer poem have been rolling around my head for days. To grieve, to finally cry when crying is called for, is to return to reality—is to return to sanity.
“I stand and wait for light
To open the dark night.
I stand and wait for prayer
To come and find me here.” (2000)
Or another one of my favorites:
“The incarnate Word is with us,
is still speaking, is present
always, yet leaves no sign
but everything that is.”
(1999 poem IX)
There’s one line from a poem in 1995 that sunk so deep into my heart and I felt so known and understood. I want to get it tattooed on my arm, but my husband is 100% not on board for that:
“Lost to all other wills but Heaven’s—wild.”
This book is dog-eared and annotated and marked up. It has been a good friend on days when my brain is tired and I just want to be spoon-fed some beauty that doesn’t make me try so hard to understand or try to grasp it. Beauty and contemplation for those who need rest. After all, that is partly what a sabbath is after all. -
This Day: Sabbath Poems is a collection of over 30 years of work by Berry. The introduction to the collection is worth the price of the book alone. He speaks about being drawn to the woods and streams around his Kentucky farm on the day of rest. He says "But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams." "In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations - other people's and also my own. . . . .To be quiet, even wordless in a good place is a better gift than poetry." Fortunately for us, Berry often found inspiration on those walks in the woods. His poetry is beautiful, measured, and meaningful. Much of it centers around the sense of wonder he has in the natural world and faith. These poems span 30 years - you can see the influence of life in his work. He speaks about farming and family. He speaks about his deep and abiding love for his wife (forget Shakespeare - Berry writes some of my favorite love poetry) He writes about the environment and our failure to protect it. He writes about war -during the years of the Iraq war, this is a common theme. The poems related to war could be described as a form of protest and if I were teaching poetry to a group of high school kids, I would definitely include some of these.
So many of the poems resonated for me. I enjoyed reading them slowly, a few at a time -- and will go back to this beautiful collection often. -
As poetry, I enjoyed this collection, but unevenly. But as a voice we need to hear, I'm grateful. In an age of the commodification of all things, Berry is grounded in the sacred particularity of the land, the marriage, and the faith one loves. In an age of violence, Berry gives voice to the futility and carnage of war. In an age of constant work, Berry wrote these hundreds of poems on sabbath days - days of rest and slow walks in fields and woods - kept weekly over twenty-five years. And in an age of the idolatry of youth and the fear and denial of death, Berry wrote these poems in the last third of his life; change, loss, and death are regularly present, in the voice of one who has made his peace with mortality.
