This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems

by Wendell Berry

Overview

Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials. With the publication of this new complete edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s work. And these magnificent poems, taken as a whole for the first time in This Day, have become one of the greatest contributions ever made to American poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619024366
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among other distinctions. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from This Day

After the long weeks
when the heat curled the leaves
and the air thirsted, comes
a morning after rain, cool
and bright. The leaves uncurl,
the pastures begin again
to grow, the animals and the birds
rejoice. If tonight the world
ends, we’ll have had this day.

Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Preface: A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems 1979-1997,
This Day: An Introduction,
Preface: From Sabbaths 2013,
I: This is a poet of the river lands,
II: Times will come as they must,
1979,
1980,
1981,
1982,
1983,
1984,
1985,
1986,
1.,
1987,
1988,
1989,
1990,
1991,
1992,
1993,
1994,
1995,
1996,
1997,
1998,
1999,
2000,
2001,
2002,
2003,
2004,
2005,
2006,
2007,
2008,
2009,
2010,
2011,
2012,

Editorial Reviews

"Overwhelmingly, though, the poems in This Day reveal the life of a person who cares about his relationship to the earth and the human community . . . His poems, whether they soothe or jolt, inspire or move to responsible action, aim at keeping 'kindness' and 'kinship' alive in the world. That alone makes This Day a book well worth reading, on a Sabbath or any other day of the week." —Marginalia Review of Books

From the Publisher