A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015

by Wendell Berry

Overview

This collection of Wendell Berry poems and essays—written outdoors on the Sabbath—“[shines] with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life” (Christian Science Monitor).

More than 35 years ago, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, when the weather allowed, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks sometimes yielded poems. Each year since, he has completed a series of these poems dated by the year of its composition.

This new sequence provides a virtual syllabus for all of Berry’s cultural and agricultural work in concentrated form. Many of these poems were written on a small porch in the woods, a place of stillness and reflection.

Recently Berry has been reflecting on more than a half century of reading, to discover and to delight in the poetical, spiritual, and cultural roots of his work. In The Presence of Nature in the Natural World, Berry’s survey begins with Alan of Lille’s 12th-century work, The Plaint of Nature. From the Bible through Chaucer, from Milton to Pope, from Wordsworth to the moderns, Berry’s close reading is exhilarating. Moving from the canon of poetry to the sayings and texts found in agriculture and science, we gain new appreciation for the complexity of the issues faced in the 21st century by the struggling community of humans on earth.

With this long essay appended to these new Sabbath Poems, the result is an unusual book of depth and engagement. A new collection of Wendell Berry poems is always an occasion for celebration, and this eccentric gathering is especially so.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619029422
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	407,243
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.

Table of Contents

Part I Sabbaths 2014

I The long cold drives life inward 5

II To the National Security Agency 6

III You don't know the day until 7

IV Having carried them within her 8

V The silence of the barn at evening 9

VI The mockingbird sings 10

VII The old man from up the creek 11

VTII A Small Porch in the Woods 12

IX The expert on resistance to torture 42

Part II Sabbaths 2015

I In the stiffened air the country hardens 53

II You can divide a bird from its life 54

III Nightmares of the age invade 55

IV We sleep and wake, wake 56

V They believe they've understood 58

VI Now comes the overflow 59

VII What a wonder I was 60

VIII Love is a universe beyond 61

IX And now this holding 62

X Patriotism blasts and crackles 63

XI He sees by the light of the sun 64

XII The old man is in the last days 66

XIII The best of human work defers 68

XIV The creek in flood at night 69

XV Again the air is fill 72

XVI The year falls also from 74

Part III The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation 77

Notes 155

Acknowledgments 159

Editorial Reviews

"[Berry's] essays, poetry and fiction have fertilized a crop of great solace in my life, and helped to breed a healthy flock of good manners, to boot. As I travel this unlikely road of opportunity, as a woodworker and writer, sure, but most often as a jackass, I have his writings upon which to fix my mind and my heart, to keep my life's errant wagon between the ditches, as it were. Mr. Berry's sentences and stories deliver a great payload of edifying entertainment, which I hungrily consume, but it is the bass note of morality thumping through his musical phrases that guides me with the most constant of hands upon my plow."
—Nick Offerman, New York Times bestselling author of Paddle Your Own Canoe

"Thoreau would be gratified . . . Here are Sabbath Poems that praise the given life."
—Lexington Herald–Leader

"[Berry's poems] shine with a gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life."
—The Christian Science Monitor

"Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life, be they those of composing a poem, preparing a hill for planting, raising a family, working for the good of oneself and one's neighbors, loving."
—The Bloomsbury Review

"Berry's craftsmanship remains impeccable. Few other poets have such chaste and precise diction or manage line and stanza with such unaffected serenity."
—Booklist

From the Publisher