A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Paperback)

by Wendell Berry (Author) "I go among trees and sit still..." (more)

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: 7.9 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #35,105 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 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 (REAL NAME)

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])

14 of 14 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 10 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 (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"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