Wendell Berry’s imagined residents of Port William, Kentucky, are nearly as familiar to his most devoted readers as their own extended family members. In a series of novels and dozens of short stories -- populated by recurring characters set over decades -- Berry brings alive the joys and sorrows of hard-working rural Kentuckians. His writing is informed by his own long-time farming life in a Kentucky River valley, one shared with Tanya Berry since their marriage in 1957.
Berry’s talents span genres. His essays offer firebrand non-fiction that takes on the destructive forces that kill off traditional ways of farming. In both his novels and essays, there’s an ever-present tenderness for the land, for human community, and for nature, mixed together with a blazing anger at the machine-driven forces that threaten them and our environment.
In a new collection of poetry Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023 -- a sequel to T his Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems that spans the years 1979-2012 -- Berry’s themes are revisited in ways both familiar and fresh. There’s a veering from gratitude to yearning in Another Day, an oscillation heightened perhaps by the profoundly reflective thinking of a writer in his 80s; Berry celebrated his 90th birthday Aug. 5.
Berry conveys so perfectly the overlapping emotions of love and grief that, at times, I read through tears (this from 2013, poem IV): The poem ends this way: There’s enduring love for Tanya in these poems. he refers to he.