‘A Timbered Choir’

 Yesterday’s note was on Wendell Berry’s collection of Sabbath poems, A Timbered Choir. I’m not sure you’d enjoy it, but I thought I’d give you some samples so you could see what kind of book it is.

My favorite poem is just four lines, and I’ve quoted it before:

 

Best of any song

is bird song

in the quiet, but first

you must have the quiet.

 

I’ve written essays about why I am, by profession, a woods walker. Berry got it in 17 words.

Some of Berry’s poems always provoke a personal reaction — that is, they get to me in a way they might not get to you. Berry, while walking the woods on Sunday mornings, sometimes mused about his work as a writer.

 

I would not have been a poet

except that I have been in love

alive in this mortal world,

or any essayist except that I

have been bewildered or afraid …

 

I read those lines and knew in my bones I was an essayist, though newspaper people call them columnists.

Finally, there is no level ground in the Geogia Piedmont. The Wise Woman and I live on a slope with a woodlot and a garden on terraces made by hand with a shovel and crowbar.

 

We keep an old way

In light and breath to stay

This household on its slope.

 

Berry wrote more than 50 books. I’ve admired his essays on agriculture and rural life, his long essay on American racism and his short stories. But if I were looking for a place to start on this wonderful American writer, it’d be A Timbered Choir.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, pp. 207, 182, 128.