GIVEN

 

by

 

Wendell Berry

 

Shoemaker Hoard

1400 65th Street, Suite 250

Emeryville, CA 94608

 

Paper, 152 pages, $14

ISBN I-59376-107-4

 

 

There is an essential humility and translucence in the poetry of Wendell Berry which strikes you the way a gentle ringing of a bell might, with the sound of the bell a quality of music with which you might hope to move through the day. In his new collection Given, he begins with something as simple as Dust and slips us quietly into another universe:

The dust motes that float

and swerve in the sunbeam,

as lively as worlds,

and I remember my brother

when we were boys:

We may be living on an atom

in somebody s wallpaper.

 

This ability to conceive an entire universe in the smallest of things is what often makes Berry s poetry as insightful as it is, as in this stanza from Sabbaths 1999:

Again I resume the long

lesson: how small a thing

can be pleasing, how little

in this hard world it takes

to satisfy the mind

and bring it to rest.

 

What may seem simple in its exposition is not so simple until he shows it to us, and what now seems clear may not have been so clear before. Sometimes the obvious must be noted, and then what seemed obvious contains yet another layer. As Berry says, when we walk into the brightness of the sun, the light may blind us, but when we turn to look back where we have come from, it all seems clear. Berry is also quite capable of turning this same focus on the pretenders among us, as he does in Some Further Words:

A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool

in public office is not a leader.

A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost

of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,

returns in the night to say again:

Let me tell you something, boy.

An intellectual whore is a whore.

 

If this seems plain but sharp and not so humble as Berry usually is, it is, but then humility has its limits. And yet the remainder of this same poem, and much of this superior volume of poetry, turns more on Berry s love of the world, love of life, love of all that is alive, and how each breath we take is a gift.

I loved my children from the time

they were conceived, having loved

their mother, who loved them

from the time they were conceived

and before. Who are we to say

the world did not begin in love?

 

The question for Berry is not, as he says in Sabbaths 2001, how to be dead, but how to be alive. For if each dawn might provide forgiveness, so, too, does each spring:

In the fortieth year of my work in this room

I sit without working and look out,

an old man, into the young light.

 

( Sabbath 2003 ). For Berry, if there is a farewell, it comes also with a welcome to what remains for discovery. When we enter his poems, and his poems enter us, we want his discoveries to be ours so that we see more of what we could not see before he saw it for us.

 

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