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Leavings: Poems

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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.

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.

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.

Leavings, Wendell Berry's latest book of poetry is right on the mark. The first several poems are commentaries on ecology, our often wasteful life styles and eating habits which hurt us and the earth, the intrusion of technology which takes us from our natural roots as interdependent human beings. The one that provokes the greatest reflection (I think) is Questionnaire in which we are asked how far we are willing to often unknowingly go to desecrate ourselves and our planet - an honest and very powerful reflection on the major issues of our time. Almost half of the book is devoted to Berry's short and pithy meditations on the place of the natural world in his life, it's rivers and streams, trees and much more. Many of these poems have been inspired by Wendell Berry's communing with nature on his Sunday morning walks. This wonderful little book carries on the tradition of Berry's ability to give voice to what is important to our lives and is often difficult to express - and he does it so well.

Author, poet and essayist Wendell Berry has been known for talking walks on Sunday mornings, walks that he uses for both observation and meditation. Most of "Leavings: Poems" is a kind of historical record of those walks, poems that observe, poems that are a meditation, and sometimes poems that are both.

Sometimes these meditations are dark. Consider "Sabbaths 2005" (XII):

If we have become incapable
of thought, then the brute-thought
of mere power and mere greed
will think for us.

If we have become incapable
of denying ourselves anything,
then all that we have
will be taken from us.

If we have no compassion,
we will suffer alone, we will suffer
alone the destruction of ourselves.

These are merely the laws of this world
as known to Shakespeare, as known to Milton.

When we cease from human thought,
a low and effective cunning
stirs in the most inhuman minds.

This "low and effective cunning" is what sees geography as a commercial asset, an asset to be made over, industrialized and changed forever. While it is not a demand for a "return to pure nature" - that is not what Berry argues here - but it is a romantic notion, to be sure, one grounded in Berry's Christian faith, one that sees people intimately connected to the land.

And then the tone changes, and Berry describes crossing a stream, but still in the same reverent terms. From "The Book of Camp Branch:"

Going down stone by stone,
the song of the water changes,
changing the way I walk
which changes my thought
as I go. Stone to stone
the stream flows. Stone to stone
the walker goes. The words
stand stone still until
the flow moves them, changing
the sound - a new word -
a new place to step or stand.

He's describing a kind of poetry of nature, with the flow of water moving stone to stone, the walker following behind the flow, and the flow creating a new place for the walk to stand.

Berry's writing is a collective whole, or perhaps holistically collective. Whether it his novels, short stories, articles, essays or poems, the same themes course throughout - themes about the land, about people and they become part of the land, the modern loss of connection to that land, and a hope for something better. He rages against the forces, "industrial humanity, an alien species," whom he sees as agents of destruction, not least for the fact that they don't know "one big story, of the world and the world's end...They know names and little stories" (Sabbaths 2007 V).

These meditations and observations are the themes and philosophy that we know as the Wendell Berry trademark - the land, the geography of the heart, upon which he has staked a literary and moral claim. "Leavings" is plainly spoken, lovingly rendered, and unmoving in its insistence for a better way.

I am a librarian and bought this book for our library. I so enjoyed Leavings that I had to buy a personal copy. I don't do that often. Berry's appreciation of life and of creation comes through with such gratitude. He seems to be aware of his own aging, and that comes through in a way that speaks straight to my heart.

The first poem, "Like Snow," proposes:
"Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out."

That's how I envision Wendell Berry composing Leavings: Poems.

His curiosity about cosmic origins wonders how what banged in the Big Bang and what chance had to do with it: "As if
That tied up ignorance with a ribbon."

His ever-present environmental conscience asks the Garden Club,
"But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature's laws that still keep us alive?"
and adds,
"The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits."

His reverence for God he demonstrates when he pleads,
"I have no love
except it come from Thee.

Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind."

He celebrates the sanctity of life and says, "The body
is a single creature, whole"...

And he "craves the wholeness of the world" too.

He celebrates nature, claiming,
"You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river".

He reminds us that, in many ways, we are the spiritual authors of our circumstances: "When people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens."

He gives us dire economics lessons:
"We forget the land we stand on
and live from. We set ourselves
free in an economy founded
on nothing, on greed verified".

He also has a word about verse.
"Poems, do not raise your voice.
Be a whisper that says, 'There!' "

That too is what Wendell Berry does in LEAVINGS: POEMS.

Enjoy the serenity, the wisdom, and sparks of lamentation and indignation that nevertheless dash from the whispers.

If your days are busy, rushed, filled with pillar-to-post hurrying that leaves you lying awake at night fretting on things still to do, don't read this book. You won't like it, much less understand Wendell Berry's profound simplicity. But if each of your days has fruitful work at its core, including a mandatory hour or two for life's appreciation, then by all means indulge yourself in the warm summer shower that is a Wendell Berry poem.

A keenly observant philosopher (all farmers are eventually philosophers), Wendell Berry shares his wisdom regarding faith, love, community, and the natural world. Reading his work is an education in how to shape oneself to get the most from one's body and mind. He's the poet laureate of practical, useful joys and a national treasure.

Wendell Berry is my only contact with poetry these days. But he is a powerful one. "Leavings" alarms me because it suggests that Mr. Berry's work is over. I certainly hope not.

Good poetry is condensed wisdom. I find nuggets of wisdom throughout Mr. Berry's new poems, some of which that brings tears. As a genealogist and Southern family man I was especially moved by a small poem that said in part,


At our dinners together, the dead
Enter and pass among us
In living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.


It is a good thing the dead don't eat much, for our family dinners took place during the 1930's and 1940's when the supply of food was greatly curtailed. But family members who had gone on before us were there, adventure by adventure as we ate and remembered. I was the youngest and I remembered those stories and from them I wrote most of my ten books. Wendell understood that timeless American custom of remembering the past and using those memories to nudge young people into the right direction.

I must recommend this book of common-sense, hard-hitting poems. It is a treasure.

I love the book, but the Kindle format is truly awful. The font goes from tiny to gigantic on different pages of the same poem, and is inconsistent throughout the book. In some places it is hard to tell where one poem ends and another begins, and the constant format changes are very distracting. I recommend the book, but the paper version is undoubtedly better than the Kindle version.