The Harvest of Fidelity

THE STILL, ATTENTIVE, affectionate, at times lamenting, always sagacious, well-defined, occasional poems in This Day, Wendell Berry’s most recent collection, are a magnificent gift to American letters.

For nearly 35 years Berry has kept the Sabbath holy. His practice is either unorthodox or so deeply orthodox that professional religionists may not recognize it. On Sundays Berry walks his Kentucky “home place,” the roughly 125 acres of bottom land in the region his family has farmed for more than 200 years. From the seventh-day silence, solitude, and natural world, Berry has crafted his Sabbath poems.

“Occasional poems” commemorate public events, but here Berry lays quiet markers to remember personal days in the life of one man. He writes in the preface: “though I am happy to think that poetry may be reclaiming its public life, I am equally happy to insist that poetry also has a private life that is more important to it and more necessary to us.”

Berry’s first collection of Sabbath poems appeared in A Timbered Choir, uniting work from 1979 (“I go among trees and sit still”) to 1997 (“There is a day / when the road neither / comes nor goes ...”). This Day includes this previous material plus dozens more written through 2013. It opens with “Preface: From Sabbaths 2013” and places Berry in his human landscape:

This is a poet of the river lands
a lowdown man of the deepest
depths of the valley, where gravity gathers
the waters, the poisons, the trash,
where light comes late and leaves early.

Language “imposes an obligation,” Berry teaches. Each word in this preface poem reflects how seriously he takes the commitment. The opening lines of this first poem both root the reader firmly in the Genesis tradition and lift the mind’s eye to the broad Sabbath expanse beyond. “Lowdown man” echoes the etymology of Adam from the fertile soil (adamah). “Poisons” recall the venom from a serpent that tempts humans to be more than we are. “Trash” results from an economy of waste, where human sin creates refuse, offal, and disposable people. And then the light, Berry’s act of faith: It may come late and leave early, but still it comes.

More than 300 poems are included here—each with the same attention to detail and richly religious imagination. Some are prayers (“Help me, please, to carry / this candle against the wind.”), others meditations on growing old (“A hawk in flight / The clearing sky / A young man’s thought / An old man’s cry”). Many are righteously political with Berry’s precise and damning critique of idolatrous capitalism (“The market is a grave / Where goods lie dead that ought / To live and grow and thrive”). Others are tributes to friends and places and companion dogs—these last particularly intimate and heartbreaking (“Digging, / the old man grieves for his old dog / with all the grief he knows”).

Longtime Berry admirers will delight at the return of the Mad Farmer in the concluding poem (“As a child, the Mad Farmer saw easily / the vision of Heaven’s Christ born in a stable”). Here the Mad Farmer is an old man, “a pilgrim in the foreshadow / of apocalypse, toward the almost forgotten / light far beyond the polluted river ....”

One unheralded and warm strand is a series of poems written over more than 55 years on Berry’s wedding anniversary. In these gems—dated May 29 and scattered throughout the anthology, Berry re-husbands his wife, Tanya, “by vows more solemn than we thought” (1982). Later, “All it has so far been / is past, long past, and yet / I see it with the young eyes / of that May, present as today” (2010). Each one makes visible a new facet in Berry’s lifelong expression of fidelity, a lost art integral to his life and writing.

“When my writing hasn’t been in defense of precious things, it’s been in thanks for precious things,” Berry told Bill Moyers at Kentucky’s Saint Catherine College last year at a conference celebrating Berry’s life and marking the 35th anniversary of the publication of his book The Unsettling of America. These Sabbath poems form the cornerstone of Berry’s graceful defense of life.