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A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

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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 krischwe@whitman.edu)

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.

"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

I can't recall the number of copies of this book that I have purchased. My own autographed copy remains a constant on my bedside table, doggeared, starred, and underlined. It is filled with the lovely, quiet poems of Wendell Berry, a true genius in the crafting of words. These poems, compiled over many years of Sunday walks (thus the Sabbath Poems), harken to the quieter side of life. The inevitable changing of seasons, places, and people. We all need a little space for thinking. Berry reminds us of who we are and why we're here. In a quiet way. Buy this book for yourself. Then order more copies for your friends.

This book is appropriately subtitled, "The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997." For that is what this volume contains: the meditations and response of a poet taking time apart from the rush of the day to reflect on his place in the world, the value of work, loving relationships, and the unmerited blessing he enjoys.

As a farmer living in rural Kentucky, Wendell Berry maintains a vital connection with the earth and its creatures. He recognizes the cycle of life and death, not as an interruption, but a natural passing into renewed existence. These Sabbath poems read like contemporary wisdom literature (written in everyday language) in the vein of Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon.

For my part as a city dweller, I was refreshed by Berry's pastoral perspective. These poems can be read one-a-day, almost like a devotional giving pause for reflection; or they can be read equally well in chunks, to gain a sense of the ebb and flow within a year of life experience. His sensitivity to the sound of words guarantees musicality and internal echoes, even in the poems which don't have obvious end-rhymes.

In modern American society -- characterized by busyness, creative destruction, modernization, and instant gratification -- this kind of poetry is necessary, like salt. To preserve that which is good, to enhance the simple pleasures, and to wake up those who are half asleep.

Buy a copy for yourself, and savor it for weeks or months. Then buy a copy for someone you care about. They'll deeply thank you.

Mr. Berry that Kentucky philosopher/poet is carrying on with his slow and steady turning. It may seem antithetical to the very being of American hurly-burly, but the agrarian Mr. Berry suggests one's sense of place can be a powerful curative to our collective ills: it can be a comfort to know where we are, to be secure in our pasts, although expectations are likely to outstrip the realities of promise.

These quiet poems are a strong antidote to American restlessness these days. Mr. Berry -- who turns 76 this year -- continues to "let hope shrink us to our proper size." The watcher on the shore invites us to stop with him awhile. In a cold season it would do us good to watch and wait for those first spring flowers. Wait and watch, the poet says, there's no hurry: for all we plan, nature will find its own place, too. "A Timbered Choir" echoes the eternal solace of nature against the darker aspects of our more recent human needs and wants. Mr. Berry offered this advice in 1993, a period increasingly looking like "the good old days:"

"... one's real duty to the future is to do as you should do now. Make the best choices, do the best work, fulfill your obligations in the best way you can, and work on a scale that's appropriately small. Make plans that are appropriately small. If you do those things, then the future will take care of itself. But if you don't do those things, then you build up a debt against the future, which is what we're doing now."

This collection of poems connects Christianity to Nature. It is Berry's answer in Western traditions to the more ecocritical values of Eastern religion and philosophy. Berry's weekly journeys mediate on the mystical journey one embarks on in finding his or her community within the larger web of life on Earth as seasons unfold. With clarity and wisom, this work professes the beauty and reverence for Nature essential to ecology and community which is neglected at the brink of the twenty-first century. Berry's words, his imagery and description, come alive and touch the heart... and impart on us through each poem to beginning healing, and then to act...

It took them 2 weeks just to ship this product, and then another 8-10 days for it to arrive. I ended up not having my book on time for class because of the horrible shiping.