Wendell Berry, Clearing
(Harcourt Brave Jovanovitch, 1977): 52
pp.
I picked up a thin paperback collection of poems by Wendell
Berry titled Clearing at the Gordon
Avenue Library fall book sale last week for fifty cents.
The work consists of seven non-rhyming poems focused on the
author’s Kentucky farm. Berry is well known for his critique of disconnected
urban and modern complexity and his praise of rural simplicity.
Reading his poems makes you want to sell your house, buy some
land, and start homesteading. Then, you
remember how tired you’d probably be.
How little time you’d have for the modern pastimes and conveniences you
actually enjoy, like picking up a cup of coffee, surfing the internet, or
writing a post for your blog. And how
you’d probably starve yourself and your family to death, because you don’t really
know how to farm. I also recall Joel Salatin’s response when asked about
Berry. He essentially said he liked
Berry but whereas Berry made a living writing and farmed on the side, he made
his living farming and only wrote on the side.
It also made me think of the dairy farm off Byrd Rd. in
Morganton, North Carolina where my grandparents had their place and where my
father and his brothers and sisters lived and worked. They had their clearing, eked a simple life
out of it, but hardly would have thought to have written poems about it.
Best new word learned from
Clearing: “Reverdure” the title of
the final poem. The word means “to cover
again with verdure [greenness, fresh vegetation].”
Best section of a poem:
stanza 8 in “Reverdure”:
One thing work gives
is the joy of not working,
a minute here or there
when I stand and only breathe,
receiving the good of the air.
It comes back.
Good work done
comes back into the mind,
a free breathe drawn.
Clearing makes you want to work on the farm. Or, just sit on you porch and look at the
farm across the road and enjoy their labor.
JTR
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