A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997 by Wendell Berry

From the Publisher

In quiet contemplation of a complex world, Berry focuses on a place or a moment. Reverence and understanding often emerge from the stillness. A small gathering of Berry's Sabbath poems were published in 1987. Now the whole series from 1979 to 1997 is collected in one book, celebrating the broad range of this vital and transforming poet.

Book Magazine

With a mystic's knowledge of silence, darkness, awe, longing, praise and light, Berry provides spiritually renewing instruction through his beautiful contemplative verse.

Library Journal

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Award, Berry (A World Lost, LJ 10/15/96) spends Sunday mornings in walking meditation in the forests and fields around his Port Royal, KY, farm. During these walks he writes, and he has brought many of these poems together in the present volume. Berry has long been an articulate and passionate defender of the environment, and his "Sabbath poems," spanning 20 years, bring the reader close to the earth, the fields and flowers, richness of the soil, and diversity of the seasons: "Too late for frost, too early for flies,/ the air carries only birdsong, the long/ breath of wind in leaves." The poet has a marvelous ear for interior rhyme: "Horse and cow,/ plow and hoe, grass to graze/ and hay to mow have brought me/ here, and taught me where I am." These poems are not uniformly pastoral; Berry reflects, too, on war, technology, and the economy in these pages, but always with a heartfelt devotion first and foremost for the earth. A contemplative treasure; highly recommended.Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward

Book - Stephen R. Whited

With a mystic's knowledge of silence, darkness, awe, longing, praise and light, Berry provides spiritually renewing instruction through his beautiful contemplative verse.

Philadelphia Inquirer

In an era of poetry written for tenure committees or for mere vanity...Berry's work leaps ot as the unclassifiable, glorious exception.

Product Details