A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 [Paperback]

Wendell Berry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1999

For more than two decades, Wendell Berry has spent his Sunday mornings in a kind of walking meditation, observing the world and writing poems. A small collection of Berrys Sabbath poems were published in 1987, but A Timbered Choir gathers all of these singular pieces to date.. Berrys Sabbath poems embrace much that is elemental to human life--beauty, death, peace, and hope.In his preface to the collection, Berry writes about the growing audience for public poetry readings. While he sees poetry in the public eye as a good thing, Berry asks us to recognize the private life of the poem. These Sabbath poems were written in silence, in solitude, and mainly out of doors, and tell us about moments when heart and mind are open and aware.Many years of writing have won Wendell Berry the affection of a broad public. He is beloved for his quiet, steady explorations of nature, his emphasis on finding good work to do in the world, and his faith in the solace of family, memory, and community. His poetry is assured and unceasingly spiritual; its power lies in the strength of the truths revealed. For more than two decades, Wendell Berry has spent his Sunday mornings in a kind of walking meditation, observing the world and writing poems. A small collection of Berrys Sabbath poems was published in 1987, but A Timbered Choir gathers all of these singular poems written to date.In his preface, Berry tells us that his Sabbath poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors, and his hope is that readers will read them as they were written: slowly, and with more patience than effort. This wish proves unusually rewarding, for Berrys voice is quiet, meditative, and wholehearted. He reminds us that there is a quietness which allows us to pay closer attention to the world and our place in it. Berrys evocation of the natural world shows us time and again the exquisite beauty of the commonplace. He writes of walking away from his home, turning, and seeing the landscape transformed by spring: In its time and great patience/ beauty had come upon us/ greater than I had imagined. He writes, also, of dark revelations; the day, for example, when his granddaughters visit the Holocaust Museum: Now, you know the worst/ we humans have to know/ about ourselves, and I am sorry. Berrys Sabbath poems embrace much that is elemental to human life--beauty, death, peace, and hope.Many years of writing have won Wendell Berry the affection of a broad public. He is beloved for his quiet, steady explorations of nature, his emphasis on finding good work to do in the world, and his faith in the solace of family, memory, and community. His poetry is always poised and unceasingly spiritual; its power lies in the strength of the truths revealed.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The public performance of poetry, writes Wendell Berry in the preface to A Timbered Choir, has become vogue in the English-speaking world. Yet, he counters, his poems are created in silence and solitude, which may be the best way to read these thoughtful lyrics about country life, verses populated by trees, horses, rivers, and stars. This volume gathers nearly 20 years' worth of Berry's Sabbath poems, written after Sunday morning walks across the fields and bottomlands of northern Kentucky. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Award, Berry (A World Lost, LJ 10/15/96) spends Sunday mornings in walking meditation in the forests and fields around his Port Royal, KY, farm. During these walks he writes, and he has brought many of these poems together in the present volume. Berry has long been an articulate and passionate defender of the environment, and his "Sabbath poems," spanning 20 years, bring the reader close to the earth, the fields and flowers, richness of the soil, and diversity of the seasons: "Too late for frost, too early for flies,/ the air carries only birdsong, the long/ breath of wind in leaves." The poet has a marvelous ear for interior rhyme: "Horse and cow,/ plow and hoe, grass to graze/ and hay to mow have brought me/ here, and taught me where I am." These poems are not uniformly pastoral; Berry reflects, too, on war, technology, and the economy in these pages, but always with a heartfelt devotion first and foremost for the earth. A contemplative treasure; highly recommended.?Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1 edition (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430063
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430065
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #120,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars HD Thoreau of 1990, June 4, 2000

By 

William Krischke (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Paperback)

This book is a rarity of rarities -- quality poetry from a Christian perspective that any and all can enjoy. Though Berry's faith is evident, it is far from oppressive, and simply adds to the peace and quiet of the poems.

Peace and quiet describe them best. Called "Sabbath Poems", they are often the result of a restful walk through the woods, a time of reflection and enjoyment of "the given world". Themes through the book are love of nature (and God through nature), a growing disgust with the modern world, the presence and comfort of death and life, and his love for his wife.

Metrically, Berry's poetry is marked by the strength of his individual lines. Sometimes he rhymes; almost always there is an internal, even organic rhythm.

As this book spans 1979 -- 1997, it is also interesting to trace the progression of his poetry. His lines grow stronger as his poems grow simpler. And he is less afraid to venture out a bit -- while most of his poems are 15-20 lines unrhymed with internal rhythm, he tries on rhyming patterns, writes one or two line works, and even writes a 13 page praise of the pastoral life.

215 pages long is a good deal longer than most books of poetry that aren't "collections". My favorite poems are towards the end, if you're only going to read a few, read the ones from 1992 on.

Poems to quite your soul and spirit. Highly recommended.

A sample poem:

I go among the trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet

around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes

and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,

and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it,

And the fear of it leaves me.

It sings and I hear its song.

After days of labor,

mute in my costernations,

I hear my song at last,

and I sing it. As we sing,

The day turns, the trees move.

(if you'd like to discuss Berry's poetry, to disagree or agree with me, to recommend a poet I might enjoy, my e-mail is [e-mail])

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "... the Sabbath comes. The valley glows.", March 1, 2004

By 

Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Paperback)

Of himself, Wendell Berry says, "I am an amateur poet, working for the love of the work." My own reading tends not to poetry but to philosophy, physics, exegesis, and related works in which language serves quite differently. And yet, whether reading Aristotle or Wendell Berry, it is inescapable that words are ultimately only allegories for much larger ideas. Perhaps in poetry this fact is embraced and romanced while in philosophic and scientific work it is ever a 'problem' to be rather embroiled in. Well, I am an amateur critic, but if the poetry in this volume is the work of an "amateur poet" I say why bother with "professional" poetry? If in fact there is such a thing, what more could it offer?
Berry is a farmer, a tender of fields and flocks and fences. Of course he is also a highly regarded poet; a man of soil and art and meditation. In this collection his recurring themes include: The importance of honest labor and the importance of rest and contemplation, "the standing Sabbath of the woods" as he calls it; the nature and passing of time, the connectedness of ourselves to our histories and of matter to spirit. Recurring metaphors of light falling into darkness and light arising from darkness, of life fading into death and of life arising from death, have both material and spiritual meanings. . .

"His passing now has brought him up
Into a place not reached by road,

Beyond all history that he knows,
Where trees like great saints stand in time,
Eternal in their patience. Loss
Has rectified the songs that come

Into this columned room, and he
Only in silence, nothing in hand,
Comes here. A generosity
Is here by which the fallen stand." (1984, p65)

The author invites the reader to consider the verses here a few at a time, in moments of quiet and solitude, of "Sabbath rest," in the same manner in which the verses were created.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "To walk on radiance, amazed.", September 3, 2001

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Paperback)

"I go among trees and sit still" (p. 5) Wendell Berry writes in the first of his 124 "Sabbath Poems" collected here. Berry is a Kentucky farmer, a poet and novelist. For twenty years, while the church bell "calls in the town" (p. 9), he has instead spent his Sunday mornings walking "into the woods" (p. 9), meditating upon the world through his poetry. In the woods, "the dead leaves rotting on the ground,/ The live leaves in the air/ Are gathered in a single dance/ That turns them round and round" (p. 11). Amidst "a timbered choir" of "Great trees, outspreading and upright,/ Apostles of the living light," Berry walks "on radiance, amazed" (p. 83). "But a man/ is small before those who have stood so long," he writes. "He stands under them, looks up, sees, knows,/ and knows he does not know" (p. 89).

"The best reward in going to the woods," Berry writes in another poem, "Is being lost to other people, and/ Lost sometimes to myself" (p. 188). "These poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors," Berry writes in the Preface to this book. "A reader will like them best, I think, who reads them in similar circumstances--at least in a quiet room" (p. xvii). "The poems," he explains, "are about moments when heart and mind are open and aware" (p. xviii). They are connected with themes of earth, family, peace and death.

G. Merritt