Leavings: Poems [Paperback]

Wendell Berry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2011

No one writes like Wendell Berry. Whether essay, novel, story, or poem, his inimitable voice rings true, as natural as the land he has farmed in Kentucky for over forty years.

Berry’s life is a long witness of love and celebration, and he writes as a poet of deep intimacy with the natural world and the lost heart of our country. With his family and friends, he continues the devotion that had him saying almost thirty years ago, “What I stand for is what I stand on.”

It has been six years since his last volume of poetry, the widely praised Given, and this new collection offers a masterful blend of elegies, lyrics, and letters, with the occasional short love poem. Alternately amused, outraged, and resolved, Berry’s welcome voice is the constant in this varied mix. As he looks back on his long life, his work resonates with a renewed depth. The book concludes with a new sequence of Sabbath poems, works occasioned by Berry’s Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his 18th book of poems, Berry (Given) rails against environmental destruction starting with the second poem: While the land suffers, automobiles thrive. He mixes philosophy, religion, politics, and personal experience in poems utilizing formal rhymes, spare jottings, and intimate letters. Most of the book is a long series inspired by Berry's regular Sunday morning walks. While Berry's various modes can make for interesting poetry, some of the poems here, particularly those that rely on a broad political brush, fall flat: The nation in its error... //Destroys its land. When hinging a poem on a candle against the wind, Berry should know he's on infertile ground. What still zings, though, are moments when this old man of letters surprises himself, as when Berry addresses his wife: I love you as I loved you/ young, except that, old, I am astonished. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Berry has become ever more prophetic. The poems he collectively calls sabbaths, composed on Sundays in the woods on his farmland since 1979, occupy four-fifths of this book. If originally meditational and quiet, however serious and deep the passions they mulled over, the sabbath poems are now oracular in the mode of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the other Hebrew prophets who enjoined their people to come to their senses and remember the Lord and his bounty, promises, and judgment. In the sabbaths of 2005–08 published here, Berry angrily mourns the degradation of the nation wrought by destruction of the land and the pursuit of wealth and power. He says that we must prepare to live without hope for a while, though in the very first of the sabbaths, he prays not to lose love along with hope: “Help me, please, to carry / this candle against the wind.” Despite anger and bitterness, he often recalls and teaches the beauty and propriety of creation, too. If he is a Jeremiah, he is also a David the psalmist. --Ray Olson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (April 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158243624X
• ISBN-13: 978-1582436241
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #232,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 74 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars From Arrivings to Leavings November 16, 2009

By Gregory L. Glover

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Wendell Berry's earlier books of poetry often carried titles that seemed to open up with a measure of hope toward the future: like Openings: Poems (Harvest/Hbj Book) and Entries, Findings and Clearing, and Given: Poems. But with Leavings: Poems Berry seems closer to sunset than sunrise. Hope, where it may be found, is hard won. Leavings is not the title of any one of the poems, but seems to sum up the book, as if Berry were deliberately taking leave of his readers. "It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old." (2007.VI) "In time a man disappears..." (2007.VII) "I know I am getting old and I say so,..." (2005.VII) There are other leavings here too, other than the merely personal, predominantly that of the descending water that flows out from a lowly stream named Camp Branch. Falling tones, falling leaves (literally), falling steps, falling stones, falling snow and falling rain transport the reader to the Kentucky countryside where we see the place that has meant and still means the world to Mr. Berry. This small collection takes the reader on a painful but beautiful journey, a shared pilgrimage down familiar paths measured in ever slower and more halting steps, made all the more valuable for the fact that the reader is not required to leave his native place to join Mr. Berry except in imagination. "So many times I've gone away from here, where I'd rather be than any place I know.... It is death." (2008.X)
The book is in two parts: the first part is a potpourri, an all-too-short assortment of letter poems, occasional pieces, and brief reflections (the 20 titled poems in the collection are here); the second part is entitled "Sabbaths 2005-2008" and carries the tag line, "How may a human being come to rest?" (54 numbered poems make up this section.)
One of my favorite poems in this collection, one I know I'll return to many times, occurs early in Part I and is entitled simply "An Embarrassment." The severe economy of language--3 or 4 word lines mostly, mostly 1 or 2 syllable words--conveys the embarrassment of friends who regularly offer thanks for a meal when they eat alone but who are now trying to decide whether to do so when they are together. One of them, having decided to make a go of the prayer, leaves (!) them both embarrassed as the prayer falls awfully flat. I'll not ruin the ending for you, but it is a Berry-esque show stopper. For someone who makes his living as a pastor, that one poem was worth the price of admission. But there are many others from this book that will now join my ever growing list of Berry favorites: e.g., "A Speech to the Garden Club of America," which admonishes us to go "back to school, this time in gardens." Or "While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row." (If you've read the other Mad Farmer Poems, you'll appreciate the appropriateness of this addition to the corpus.)
I have been reading (and re-reading) Wendell Berry's work for quite a while now. That means I've heard many of the words and seen many of the ideas before. But these poems are new, encountered for the first time like today's bracing walk in a familiar woods I've visited many times. The woods and the friends with whom we walk, like the day itself, are the same as they've always been but also different on this day. In that sense these poems are very gratefully received; it is, after all, November and there are too few such walks left to me ...and to you.
Do yourself a favor. Get the book and spend time with it out of doors while the leaves are still falling, or indoors by the fire in the depths of winter.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars refreshing, bracing, powerful, real December 20, 2009

By CygnusBooks

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I've pretty much ignored poetry, with a very few exceptions, for decades now, but thanks to a small bookstore with idiosyncratic shelving, I happened across this book. Berry's essays had been recommended to me more than once, but I'd never got around to reading them, and (shame on me) I didn't even know he was a poet. Anyway, out of curiosity I picked up this book and was immediately enthralled. It was everything I had missed in the little poetry I've encountered the past 30 years: authentic, spare, direct, unpretentious (lots of one-syllable words), musical, thought-provoking, beautifully crafted yet with that magical feeling of being absolutely unforced and natural (and yet inevitable) that comes only with true craft and talent. I could go on. This was the real thing, and it reminded me why once upon a time I actually enjoyed (some) poetry. This is a true marriage of art and deep living and wisdom, and if you care anything about words (or the Earth), you owe it to yourself to experience it.

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wendell Berry is mad December 13, 2009

By Patricia Kramer

Format:Hardcover

Wendell Berry is mad, he has had enough of how things are going. He is not only writing about it, he protested with Bill McKibben and James Hansen at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C. re climate change.

Questionnaire
1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.