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| Wendell Berry |
New Collected Poems
by
Wendell Berry
Berkeley,
California: Counterpoint
391
pp.; $30
Review by Katherine
Dalton
Entire contents
copyright © 2012 by Katherine Dalton. All
rights reserved.
Why
read a poem, you ask, you whose days are so full of text and subtext? I will ask you in return: Why stint yourself the solace?
In
the place that is my own place, whose earth
I
am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a
great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Some
might argue the point today, but poetry has traditionally been considered the
highest of the written arts. When
well done, it can be a remarkable mix of verbal meaning plus cadence and image,
and it wraps up words and song and the pictures conjured in our minds in a way
that points to a meaning deeper and more innerly-felt than prose can
accomplish.
All
writing, of course, uses rhythm and sonority and mental image, but poetry is
writing distilled and concentrated and heady – our literary eau de vie.
Poetry
can be a drum roll into battle, or an elegy for the dead. It can be a love song or a slap in the
face. It can be a whistling in the
dark. Wendell Berry has written all
of these.
To
be sane in a mad time
is
bad for the brain, worse
for
the heart. The world
is
a holy vision, had we clarity
to
see it – a clarity that men
depend
on men to make.
Mr.
Berry has previously published Collected Poems (1985) and Selected
Poems (1998). This New
Collected Poems contains many of those included before, along with poems
written since. It lacks any
Sabbath poems – a significant omission. But otherwise, as the dust jacket tells us in tiny type on the front
flap, “This book contains all the poems from previous compilations Mr. Berry
wishes to collect...”
This
is a harvest basket of his own choosing. No complaining, please. The cukes and salsify are too cute, I believe. They grate on a rereading.
The
grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose
hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to
him the soil is a divine drug. He
enters into death
yearly,
and comes back rejoicing. He has
seen the light lie down
in
the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
Now
77, Mr. Berry has reached a degree of eminence that probably makes him
uncomfortable. I saw him kick like
a mule once at a straightforward compliment on a public stage from his friend
Bill McKibben, and I suspect few writers are less interested in being addressed
as a national treasure.
He
remains in danger of that, however, for several reasons. He is the author of excellent novels
and one of the best: Jayber
Crow. He has made some of the
clearest arguments about public advocacy, civic responsibility, rootedness and
the necessity for rural life and wise land use of anybody now arguing. Everything he wrote 35 years ago in The
Unsettling of America is only more true today and not less so. And he has lived by his own stated
principles in a way few of us can boast.
But
he is, I believe, a poet before anything else – a poet of flesh and blood and not
a plaster saint. His first book
was a book of poetry, and with all the other kinds of writing he has done he
has never left poetry alone. Poetry is the way he praises his much-loved wife, and poetry seems to be
one of the ways he prays (surely that is part of the purpose of the Sabbath
poems). That means, among other
things, that these lovely and sometimes intentionally unlovely poems show Mr.
Berry working his hardest to witness to what he feels called to say.
All
the lives this place
has
had, I have. I eat
my
history day by day.
Bird,
butterfly, and flower
pass
through the seasons of
my
flesh. I dine and thrive
on
offal and old stone,
and
am combined within
the
story of the ground.
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