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Wendell Berry
The farmer in his den… Kentucky nature poet Wendell Berry.
The farmer in his den… Kentucky nature poet Wendell Berry.

The Peace of Wild Things review – a rich harvest

This article is more than 6 years old

A new edition of work by the American poet Wendell Berry draws its slow-moving brilliance from the stillness of nature

This column is usually reserved for new collections, but there is a reason to break this rule for Wendell Berry. It is extraordinary that he is not better known. I was on the verge of saying he should be a household name, but households have never been his thing. His selected verse, in a new edition by Penguin, is the work of an outdoorsman; it aspires to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea that nature is, for all the depredations, “never spent”. This is poetry to lower blood pressure, to induce calm.

Berry’s gift, as a Kentucky farmer and as a writer, is to root himself as a tree might – not to commandeer nature but to cherish it. I do not think it fanciful to see these poems as a form of manual labour – of necessary work. The title poem – his best known – is, at the same time, a secular prayer. The language is slightly churchy, which might not be to everyone’s taste, although there is pleasure in seeing church and meadow come together harmoniously. Berry repeatedly finds a remedy in nature, yet never comes to it in quite the same way.

He is master of “slow time” (as Keats put it). In this steadying writing, nothing is forced or hurried. It is as if the seasonal had got into the form of the poems, a diurnal round, a mortal pattern, a recognition that renewal occurs beyond any poet or his pen. The apple tree that stands at the start of the collection is a witness to this, balanced between accident and design: “The tree lifts itself up/ in the garden, the/ clutter of its green/ leaves halving the light,/ stating the unalterable/ congruity and form/ of its casual growth.”

The word “casual” is the key. At no point is Berry involved in a willed, calculated or deluded idyll. And there are only two regular settings for his poetry: outdoor solitude and sleeplessness at night. For fears also abound and he cannot always divert his mind through poetry from irreparable damage, from the fear that nature is in mortal jeopardy. He knows this is part of the picture – unlike Hopkins, he cannot ignore the perils of climate change. He confronts this anguish in the same honest, level way with which he records joy.

In a poem called The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer, he describes going against the grain of organised religion – of saying no to say yes, of withholding in order to give. The poem is an assertion of an apparently cussed individuality, but more importantly, an acknowledgment that prescriptions deflect spontaneity: “When they asked me would I like to contribute/ I said no, and when they had collected/ more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.”

It is a commonplace to say poetry is best read aloud, but Berry’s is the exception. It is hard to read these poems well, they are too quiet, solitary, inward. They do not want to be projected any more than Berry’s mad farmer wants to go with the grain of others.

The diction is simple, even if Berry says, in Throwing Away the Mail: “Nothing is simple,/ not even simplification.” There is trust in plain speaking. This is devotional language at the service of something greater. And while there are many things Berry’s poetry does not do, his ability to ground himself – and us – is unrivalled. The Wild Geese ends:

And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry is published by Penguin (£8.99). To order a copy for £6.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

This article was amended on 21 February to correct Wendell Berry’s name in the standfirst

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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