Wendell Berry is one of the most distinguished elder living American writers, known for his novels, poems, and nonfiction essays about agriculture, culture, and the natural world. He is, above all, a poet to whom we turn for the spiritual practices of reverence, listening, and faith.
Readers of Berry may know that he has long had a habit of writing poems on his day of rest. These “Sabbath poems” have been collected in earlier books, and this one includes all of those previously unpublished and written over the last decade.
The poet is a lifelong farmer, and so he writes often about the land. He is also a conservationist who wants to see land and its creatures protected from what the world often calls “progress.”
Berry is also a lifelong Protestant Christian, but he rarely uses Christian-specific language (“Christ” once, and only occasionally words like “prayer”). In fact, his often-published and frequently quoted poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” (from an earlier collection) is an amazing example of a poem that’s about what is often called prayer, even though neither that word nor any religious words appear.
In one of these poems, he references his age (now 90) and his gratitude with lines: “The old man in his latter days / prays his thanks, prays his love / of the world.” In another, he points to Sabbath itself as a kind of salvation: “The Sabbath of the standing woods / is our refuge from our age’s will, / its machines and poisons, noises / and fires. It is the Sabbath / of will-less receiving and our thanks.”
The book has no introduction, and no notes, simply 200 pages of poems. The first one is, as is often the case, the poet describing himself, as “a tree of a sort, rooted / in the dark, aspiring to the light, / dependent on both.” These are indeed poems of light in darkness.
Berry laments a general loss of faith in the world around him — another consistent theme — with this short poem:
“They believe they’ve understood
belief in ‘the transcendent’
by disbelieving it.
“Some mental feats remain
impossible even to the best
of human minds.”
And see the excerpt accompanying this review for a poem about the importance of silence for listening.
