In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

Since it’s impossible to entirely ignore the war in the newspaper, on the television, on the net, or even in friends’ blogs, I’ve been working hard to make sure that I devote the rest of my life to more uplifting sources. It’s hard to imagine a writer more uplifting than Wendell Berry. I’ve [...]

During a slight lull in tax preparation, I managed to finish Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir. Strangely, about the time I started feeling that Wendell Berry was an overly optimistic poet, I suddenly encountered this poem from 1991: The year begins with war. Our bombs fall day and night, Hour after hour, by death Abroad appeasing wrath, Folly, and [...]

The further I read in Wendell Berry’s Collected Poems, the more poems I found that I liked. Today, I’m covering poems published from 1964 to 1968, approximately the first hundred pages of the book. As I read the poems, uncharacteristically I found myself agreeing with a blurb found on the back cover of the [...]

Although I tend to agree with the philosophy presented in Berry’s Collected Poems written between 1970 and 1977, I don’t particularly identify with them. The poems written in 1970 are entitled Farming: A Handbook, and the truth is that although I’ve always had a vegetable garden, I’ve never seen myself as a [...]