“Another Day” Is a Walk in the Woods With Wendell Berry https://ift.tt/tZbwfYR
If you are already a Wendell Berry fan – and it’s hard not to be considering his prolific writing career that has spanned decades and genres – you will not be disappointed with Another Day, his new collection of poems that covers eleven years of poetry writing. If you have yet to discover the poetry of Wendell Berry, this is a beautiful entry point into his body of work that has inspired writers like bell hooks and Michael Pollan. The physical book itself, published by Counterpoint Press, is a hardcover edition on thick, cream-colored paper with a deckled edge, gorgeously produced in the United States (which is fitting for this poet).
This collection is a continuance of Berry’s This Day published in 2013 and began when he first started writing “Sabbath poems” in 1979, that is, poems mostly written on Sunday walks in the woods as a spiritual or reflective exercise. While Another Day stands alone as its own body of work, it contains some poems from previous volumes. The pieces have a timeless quality that is simultaneously old fashioned, as Berry continues to write about his family farm in Kentucky where he works the land without the use of modern machinery, and contemporary as it addresses global warming, war, the pillage of natural resources for personal gain, and technological advances that detract from humanity.
Deeply rooted in agrarian life, these untitled poems are organized by year and season. In the opening poem, Berry writes about a poet of the river lands who “is a tree of a sort, rooted / in the dark, aspiring to the light, / dependent on both. His poems / are leavings, sheddings, gathered / from the light…” Many poems merge imagery from the land with the speaker as these are inextricably linked. There is a romantic, lyric quality to some of the ecopoems as in, “Where the winter lay dead-brown / on the woods floor, now green / leaves and flowers open / and flourish in unconditional being…” As a reader, it often feels like you are accompanying the poet on his Sunday walks through the woods, noticing the change of season and experiencing gratitude for the abundance and mysteries of nature.
In the section of poems written in 2014 (my personal favorites for the conversation they are in with other poets and agricultural texts), the poems become concrete and practical, “Good soil is a miracle, at once / holding and letting go.” The poems in this year are nature-centric and Berry reminds humans of their place in the grand scheme of things: “Nature does not prefer humans / to the fish, the eagles, or the moles. / She never did betray the heart / that loved her,” (where the last line is borrowed from William Wordsworth). Berry weaves in lines from Shakespeare with those of Peterson Field Guides, Chaucer, and Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament seamlessly in these poems. Truth supports beauty and beauty supports truth in these ecopoems that point out the unintended consequences of human actions. For example, the emerald ash borer that arrived as a result of international trade and decimates trees, “in the centuries-old global economy; / the side effects, unforeseen” and “unknown to those best positioned / to profit by global ignorance.”
Berry doesn’t pull punches when he writes about the short-sightedness of industrial society’s decisions or greed. In one poem the speaker asks, “Will the robotic tree perform / the original miracle, transforming / light into life?” Elsewhere he notes that technology does not bring “the longed-for / peace to all the world,” becoming instead “a weapon to break the world in pieces.” Our speaker notes that, “to warm our houses we set the world afire. / The gullible, the frivolous, the hard of heart / make modern miracles normal / terror and perpetual war.” Berry’s writing has the remarkable quality of being both traditional and revolutionary.
As in Berry’s previous collections of Sabbath poems, there are poems about aging, family, community, and love. Most of these poems are dated with a birthday or anniversary as in, “When I speak to you of love / I do not speak as I am / but as I am in love with you / which is better than I am.” Wendell Berry turns 90 this year and the poems that look back over a life spent according to one’s values seem particularly poignant and focused in Another Day. Overall, this is a collection from the heart of a poet whose philosophy of the interconnectedness of human life to nature remains as steadfast as the deeply rooted trees and river carving the land he writes about.
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