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Translations
Wendell
Berry. Given. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005.
Cloth: $22.00
Review by
Tom Pynn
A new volume of Wendell Berry’s poems is a gift I
often find difficult to live up too. His
is a demanding voice, a voice calling us into listening
To where the life
Of living things actually
is lived;
Closer to the beauty that
saves
And considers this earth.
It
is here, close and still closer to each other and things in time, without ever
knowing whether the time will ever be reclaimed or only imperfectly remembered,
that we receive what is given and hear the call to participate in what is to be
done: the real work, “the work of beauty, faith, and gratitude/ eternally alive
in time.” The poems gathered in Given,
as all his poems from the earliest volume The Broken Ground (1964)
demonstrate, are of the poet’s gaze upon the immanent while hopeful of the
transcendent. The immanent is never to
be sacrificed for the “jabber of ‘a better world’” and the transcendent is
never to be trivialized by the power mongering of those who would wage war
against all in the name of peace.
Perhaps
the difficulty of Wendell’s poems is that they are the utterances of a man
trying to live a real life is an increasingly unreal world, a world usurped by
men with hearts stuffed with fire and ice who’s destructive ambition scars the
ecological landscape and threaten the deep recesses of the human heart.
Sometimes conservative, sometimes radical, always provocative and thoughtful,
Berry’s poems speak in many voices: the meditative, the humorous, the didactic,
the political, and the religious, among others.
As he once suggested in his essays on the art of poetry, Standing By
Words (1983) and reiterates in the poem “Some Further Words,” My purpose/ is a language that can repay just
thanks/ and honor for those gifts, a tongue/ set free from fashionable lies.”
To bring the human tongue closer to the natural world and the transcendent has
been Berry’s task as a poet. It is
telling that the first edition of Standing By Words and the new
2005 edition put out by Shoemaker & Hoard has on its cover the Chinese
character for xin, often translated as “heart
and mind” indicating the Chinese view that our humanity is based upon feeling
our way in the world and to making our way/fashion a life in the
world. Berry’s poems are the products of
a life lived in place echoing both the Chinese sensibility that the way is made
by walking and the ancient Doric harmony of word and deed.
The unity of life, life in all its
grace and danger and our response to it that is the main theme pervading Berry’s
work: novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction essays. Within the larger theme of unity, Berry’s
poems evoke particular themes of memory, marriage, mystery, resurrection,
grief, care, time, and art. In the
collection’s second poem, “In a Country Once Forested,” Berry evokes the
poignant experience of remembering a continuous harmony now interrupted:
The young woodland
remembers
the old, a dreamer dreaming
Of an old holy book,
an old set of instructions,
And the soil under the
grass
is dreaming of a young forest,
And under the pavement
the soil
is dreaming of grass.
We
must be careful not to read the extension of memory to the non-human as simply
pathetic fallacy. This is a deep
ecology that acknowledges non-human life forms as having a fuller experience of
life and living than many of us can or want to imagine. In granting the non-human world full rights
of participation in life, Berry challenges our technocratic arrogance and our
holy exclusivism.
Even when some of his poems are clearly heard as the voice of a
practicing Christian, Berry does not align himself with the mainstream religionism of our times; instead, he has called himself a
forest Christian, one who seeks not only to be a defender of what he calls
country life, but also to articulate a biblical argument for ecology.
Berry has always confronted the
Enlightenment fascination with techno-scientific rationalism and its
methodological reductionism with his meditative voice bordering on
mysticism. In his earlier book of
essays, Life is a Miracle (2001), Berry takes to task E.O. Wilson’s
concept of consilience, the idea that all human
understanding can be brought to its fullest unified expression under the gaze
of empirical science. Berry rebels
against the tyrannizing of phenomena in his poem “The Fact”:
After all these
analyses,
the fact
remains intact.
Instead
of reducing phenomena to a handful of “natural” laws, Berry remains faithful to
the silence out of which poetry comes allowing things to stand forth as they are:
“There are no unsacred places;/ there are only sacred places/ and desecrated
places.” Furthermore, the above poem
poses the philosophical question, “Is a thing’s appearance to consciousness any
less wondrous in our knowing of it?”
After all, as Socrates once observed, it is the experience of wonder
that makes it possible for us to know and to remember. This is, then, the deeply flawed project of
instrumental reason: in turning away from the embodied things of the world, of
being-in-the-body, the body of the world is forgotten. In forgetting the body of the world, the
results are legion: waste, pollution, famine, ozone depletion, the breakdown of
trust and community, war.
In the face of overwhelming
ecological and soul destruction, Berry’s humility is staggering: “Again I
resume the long/ lesson: how small a thing/ can be pleasing.” In this tenth Sabbath poem from 1999, Berry
comes to himself in a radical act of self-questioning:
What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
Be.
To
my mind Berry’s Sabbath poems, a practice brought into book form with Sabbaths
1987, are Berry’s finest meditative work.
Recently, all his Sabbath poems to date have been collected in, A
Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997. Yet, Sabbaths come and go and Berry continues
to write and so Given includes Sabbath poems
from 1998 to 2004. More than half of
this current book is devoted to Berry’s series of Sabbath poems. These are poems that give us a clue to the
heart of Berry’s life as husband, father, farmer, and writer. Not to suggest that Berry is a confessional
poet, but rather that Sabbath poems are metaphysical and as such are concerned
with the harmonizing of the visible and the invisible, that is to say, with the
tension of self and no-self realized in freedom. In Sabbath meditation, the poet knows once
more “the health of self-forgetfulness.”
That in attaining a closer connection with the living land
I know
that this is one of the thresholds
between Earth and Heaven,
from which even I may step
forth from my self and be free.
Note how both Earth and Heaven are
capitalized. This is important because
it demonstrates Berry’s ongoing commitment to life within the greater
exigencies of time. In time Berry has been
and continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness, or at least in the
country, urging us through all the silence, humor, and wisdom his creativity
can muster to tend our places well and care for them and others and not to care
for what profits us.