Given: Poems - Hardcover

Berry, Wendell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593760612 ISBN 13: 9781593760618

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2005

Synopsis

For five decades Wendell Berry has been a poet of great clarity and purpose. He is an award-winning writer whose imagination is grounded by the pastures of his chosen place and the rooms and porches of his family's home. In Given, the work is as rich and varied as ever before. With his unmistakable voice as the constant, he dexterously maneuvers through a variety of forms and themes―political cautions, love poems, a play in verse, and a long series of Sabbath Poems that resulted from Berry's recent Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.

Berry's work is one of devotion to family and community, to the earth and her creatures, to the memories of the past, and the hope of the future. His writing stands alongside the work of William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost as a rigorous American testament.

About this title

From Booklist:

The latter half, "Sabbaths 1998-2004," of Berry's first all-new collection since A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 (1998) contains more of the meditational poems Berry conceives on Sundays alone in the woods on his farm. The other half's three parts contain, respectively, short poems of observation, hortatory poems varying in length from epigram to six-page public epistle, and a brief verse play. The observational poems show the most variety of tone and form and may please the broadest range of readers. The play reprises the notion of personalized community integrity at the heart of Berry's novel Jayber Crow (2000) and extends it beyond death. The intervening exhortations, collectively called "Further Words," reflect Berry-the-prophet, by turns angrily haranguing ("The Ongoing Holy War against Evil"), justly explaining himself ("Some Further Words"), naturally moralizing ("Lysimachia Nummularia"), earnestly preaching ("Original Sin"), and oracularly commanding ("The Future," which probably should be read at every public meeting in the U.S.). For those who believe that life and the world are gifts, this is an invaluable book. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review:

"In an era of poetry written for tenure committees or for mere vanity, poetry praised for careerist or for idiosyncratic reasons, Berry's work leaps out as the unclassifiable, glorious exception."

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1593760612
• ISBN 13: 9781593760618
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 156