Review by Choice Review
Sequel to, but shorter than, Berry's Sabbaths (1987), this book brings together 26 meditations (ranging in length from two lines to several pages) written on a series of Sundays between 1987 and 1990. Sermon-like, these poems, like Sunday morning walks that inspired them, amble through a known countryside of mind and imagination, playing over ideas and images familiar to such themes and settings. Too often, however, the themes and forms, like the insistent, overt rhymes, seem rather automatic. At other times, both form and theme seem unduly convoluted "distracted by a letter accusing me/of distraction, which distracts me." Such habits are overworked. They tend to throw the reader off, and, thus, ironically, they detract and distract from what, no doubt, the poems were intended for in the first place. Recommended only for those libraries that aim at a comprehensive collection of contemporary poetry. W. V. Davis; Baylor University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
The strong religious undercurrent in Berry's work surfaces in this gathering of Sunday meditations, most of them set in regular verse forms: quatrain, couplet, sonnet, terza rima, and some more intricate, although never so much as to draw attention away from the poems' meditative voice and devotional content. Berry retreats to the woods for his Sabbaths and, characteristically, contemplates the cycles of life. He sees all living things as expressions of the holy light conjured from darkness in the primal act of creation (``Let there be light''). The darkness, too, is holy, the resting place and wellspring of light and life. Humanity's situation within the vast circuiting of light out of darkness, of the quick from the dead, is also often on his mind as he considers his own work of farming, particularly affectingly in the long poem addressed ``To Den,'' his son. The collection's acmes, however, come in lyrics of pure praise, such as those on the winter wren, on paired swallows, and on the great trees that ``return / to the small woodland let alone'': these are in a class with the most luminous nature lyrics of Wordsworth. RO. 811'.54
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Although these psalm-like verses were written on the Sabbath, they are also songs in praise of the six days of labor that precede it. A poet, novelist and essayist, Berry is first and foremost a small farmer who works his ancestral land in rural Kentucky. These poems reflect a utopian visionreminiscent of the religion of the Native American peoplethat relates human life to the cycles of the Earth. Organized by years rather than by specific titles, Berry's lyrical hymns follow the seasons of birth and death, growth and decay, over a seven-year period, from 1979 to 1986. According to this writer's system of values, death holds no real terror; instead, the danger that confronts humankind is our increasing alienation from the land. Berry is widely admired for his authenticity and his deep commitment to an ideal way of life. In effect, these verses, some of which borrow directly from the Bible, are meant to be read as prayers and meditations, both to instruct and to give sustenance to the weary: ``Bewildered in our timely dwelling place,/ Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace.'' (September) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Berry's eight years (1979-1986) of Sunday meditations, these half-hymn, half-prayer poems fuse Thoreau's distaste for the ``fume and shock and uproar/ of the internal combustion America,'' his idealistic spirituality and praise of daily work and trust, with a need for grace and natural creation. Berry's poetry is most persuasive when it locates a supernal design in specific detail:``Among/ High maple leaves a spider's wheel/ Shines, work of finest making made.'' Berrythe 20th-century American Wordsworthhere summons out of the still places of his Kentucky streams, gardens, fields and woodlands healing ``fellow presences, independent, called/ out of nothing by no word of ours,/blessed.'' ``Their life's a benefaction made.'' Frank Allen, Assoc. Dean, Continuing Education, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
