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 her in "2022, poem I, dated 5/29/22," saying love "came to him one time in the person of a girl/ and it abides in the girl’s great-grandmotherhood." Reverence for God is here too; after all, these are sabbath poems (Berry does not always capitalize the word.
) In the introduction to the earlier volume This Day , Berry writes about the notion of the sabbath as a day of rest, qualifying it as a day when people might understand that “the providence or the productivity of the living world, the most essential work, continues while we rest.” In Another Day , the reverence is sometimes made explicit (2015, poem XIII): More inviting, I think, are praise poems that keep open an interpretation that can be religious, or not, as in: "There’s the sheep who gives birth and bleats out her absolute eloquence of joy; the trees whose company offers the luxury of wordlessness; the phoebes who dance/ in the air, on the branch,/ their love for one another." Indeed, Berry asks us to see, truly see, other lives -- and when we cannot, to know nonetheless they are there, vitally helping to make our world (2014, poem VIII): A delicious sharpness marks Berry’s writing about screen obsession -- our cultural commitment to staring at, playing with, and living through computers and phones that diverts our seeing what (and who) matters (2013, poem XVII): For the industrial machines that rend the Earth, that scale up in size and economy the destruction of small farms and the environment entire — Berry reserves a special seething.
A long poem from 2023 most fully tells this story. In it, a man dreams that he returns from the dead to a country he knew, his own place in life (2023, poem I): What follows is a dialogue with a “familiar voice” in which the dreamer’s “participation in the conflagration of the world” is interrogated, as is much else; the dreamer asks why he was brought to that place. The reply comes as the poem’s conclusion: Like Berry’s fierce essays and luminous novels, these poems offer gifts of vision, of knowing that there is another way to live now on this Earth: a way that honors love, the land, and all beings.
Can any of us rest while there's still a chance to bring that about?.
