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Window Poems

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Just holding this book makes me feel good. It is a new edition of early Wendell Berry poems beautifully presented with a foreword full of praise and appreciation. "...the author is throwing the dice, the stakes are high: his long wrists are loose, he's on a roll".

Verse 15

" The sycamore gathers
out of the sky, white
in the glance that looks up to it
through the black crisscross
of the window. But it is not a glance
that it offers itself to.
It is no lightning stroke
caught in the eye. It stays,
an old holding in place.
And its white is not so pure
as a glance would have it,
but emerges partially,
the tree's renewal of itself,
among the mottled browns
and olives of the old bark.
Its dazzling comes into the sun
a little at a time
as though a god in it
is slowly revealing himself.
How often the man of the window
has studied its motley trunk,
the out-starting of its branches,
its smooth crotches,
its revelations of whiteness,
hoping to see beyond his glances,
the distorting geometry
of preconceptions and habit,
to know it beyond words.
All he has learned of it
does not add up to it.
There is a bird who nests in it
in the summer and seems to sing of it-
the quick lights among its leaves
-better than he can.
It is not by him imagining
its whiteness comes.
The world is greater than its words.
To speak of it the mind must bend.

Read it slowly. Re-read it. Wendell Berry is a national treasure and should be honored as such.

Connected. Perhaps that is the operative descriptor of American poet Wendell Berry. Now in his 70s Berry's influence on contemporary poetry is not unlike that of William Carlos Williams or Robert Frost, among others of an earlier time, who found beauty in the quiet of nature and the honesty of tilling the land. This collection WINDOW POEMS dates back to the fifties and sixties when Berry lived in minimalist cabin on the Kentucky River, a cabin later transformed into a 'house', the feature of which was a large, paned window through which Berry gazed, pondered and wrote these 27 interconnected poems. They are simple observations with profound meanings and readily identify Berry's concerns with agrarian values, connection to nature and man's place in that order, a work ethic and commitment to fidelity that enhances our joy of the earth's bounty, a bounty that most assuredly includes the mystery of approaching and receding seasons, along with his disdain for environmental abuse, violence (both against fellow man and against nature), and ignorance of the secrets of the universal order.

This book is a work of art, in content to be sure, but also in design and presentation. The highly regarded poet James Baker Hall has provided a Foreword titled 'Wendell's Window & The Wind's Eye', and in this simple yet eloquent essay Hall describes Berry's history and the significance of this particular collection of poems. Enhancing the beauty of the book are wood engravings by Wesley Bates whose craftsmanship captures the natural wonders of Berry's poems.

But in the end it is the transcendent splendor of these poems that takes the readers breath, holds it for a moment and then allows it to form a sigh of appreciation. 'In the Heron's eye/ is one of the dies of change./ Another/ is in the sun./ Each thing is carried/ beyond itself./ The man of the window/ lives at the edge,/ knowing the approach/ of what must be, joy/ and dread.' And the last fragment '..The window has an edge/ that is celestial,/ where the eyes are surpassed.' This volume, so perfectly designed, contains many moments for the reader's keeping. Welcome to Wendell Berry. Grady Harp, November 07