Leavings: Poems

(Paperback)

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No one writes like Wendell Berry. Whether essay, novel, story, or poem, his inimitable voice rings true, as natural as the land he has farmed in Kentucky for over forty years. Berry's life is a long witness of love and celebration, and he writes as a poet of deep intimacy with the natural world and the lost heart of our country. With his family and friends, he continues the devotion that had him saying almost thirty years ago, "What I stand for is what I stand on." It has been six years since his last volume of poetry, the widely praised Given, and this new collection offers a masterful blend of elegies, lyrics, and letters, with the occasional short love poem. Alternately amused, outraged, and resolved, Berry's welcome voice is the constant in this varied mix. As he looks back on his long life, his work resonates with a renewed depth. The book concludes with a new sequence of Sabbath poems, works occasioned by Berry's Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.

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Berry has become ever more prophetic . . . In the Sabbaths of 200508 published here, Berry angrily mourns the degradation of the nation wrought by destruction of the land and the pursuit of wealth and power. He says that we must prepare to live without hope for a while, though in the very first of the Sabbaths, he prays not to lose love along with hope: Help me, please, to carry / this candle against the wind. Despite anger and bitterness, he often recalls and teaches the beauty and propriety of creation, too. If he is a Jeremiah, he is also a David the psalmist.
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Author Bio

Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.