A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015

by Wendell Berry

Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2016

About the author

Wendell Berry was a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth (1967), Jayber Crow (2000), and That Distant Land (2004).

Berry was an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He was also a 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, from 2014 to his death, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

abridged from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Claire Stanovich]

First Wendell :)
“Think of a world of no fall, no gravity calling downward, homeward, brining all by the light uprisen down to rest in the resting land — a world, instead, where all that dies would fly upward and outward, nameless & alone. How sterile then would be the earth, seasonless the year” (72).

“One small seed, lost in the multitude, dying in the ground, sends into light a mighty tree. But that is the original miracle returned once again in time, and who of us can foretell in time the future of a miracle” (46).