Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

Courier-Journal reviews Wendell Berry's "A Place in Time"

Reading Wendell Berry’s new short story collection (his first work of fiction since 2006) is a little like saying hello and goodbye to a long-lost friend in the same breath. Here again are so many of the unforgettable characters whom fans of the fictional small Kentucky town of Port William have come to know and love over these past 50 years.

via courier-journal.com

Wendell Berry's new story collection reviewed

When Berry (Hannah Coulter, 2004, etc.) hasn’t been writing poetry or essays on farming life, he’s written fiction set in Port William, Ky., which rivals William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in terms of its breadth of imagined historical detail. These 20 new stories feature familiar characters from earlier novels and stories, but the reader needn’t have read those to get pleasure out of these. That said, the pleasures of this book are modest: Many of these stories are slight fables, flickering with only the slightest plot then softly ending, consistently well-drawn but not always memorable.

via Kirkus Reviews

 

A review of "The Prince's Speech"

Prince Charles believes our way of producing food -- a process reliant on fossil fuels, pesticides, and fertilizers -- destroys the very resources upon which our food depends, such as soil and water. And we can’t keep it up much longer.

"Yield increases for staple food crops are declining," he told the rapt audience. "They have dropped from 3 percent in the 1960s to 1 percent today -- and that is really worrying because for the first time, the rate is less than the rate of population growth. And all this, of course, has to be set against the ravages of climate change. Already yields are suffering in Africa and India, where crops are failing to cope with ever-increasing temperatures and fluctuating rainfall."

via www.onearth.org

Review of "The Prince's Speech: On the Future of Food"

In the end, the importance of a book like this depends less upon who wrote it and more on who reads it. The folks at Rodale press, who kindly provided me a copy, seem to think the combination of its small size, compelling prose and royal provenance may spread these ideas beyond the usual readership for such debate, and I hope they are right.

In any case they deserve a nod for the perhaps dubious business practice of paying to print a high-quality book whose main text is already available online for free, from a speech that can still be watched on YouTube, and pricing it at just $6.99 on paper, less as an e-book.

I say “main text” because the printed version brackets the prince’s speech with an elegant introductory essay by Wendell Berry and a rousing afterword by Will (“Growing Power”) Allen and Eric (“Fast Food Nation”) Schlosser.

via www.minnpost.com

Review of "The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry"

The book begins with a letter to Berry from the poet Wallace Stegner (Berry’s former literature professor). Stegner praises Berry’s commitment to principles and for not succumbing—like so many writers—to trends, addictions, or a lust for danger. In this sense Berry is truly countercultural, one who champions stability and continuity in a world that promotes constant change. Anne Husted Burleigh writes that this sense of stability begins with Berry’s idea of marriage. Marriage is never private, to just a spouse. Rather it is also a public commitment to God and community. Commitment, and fidelity to that commitment, is the basis of marriage. And to Berry, this is the foundation of all social relations.

via www.kirkcenter.org

"The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry" reviewed

A noticeable difference in The Humane Vision is the inclusion of criticism of Berry’s writing.  Now, this criticism is given by admirers, but it is included nonetheless.  D.G. Hart examines the intersections and tensions that exist between Berry and “Conservative Christianity.”  Hart zeroes in on Berry’s distrust of the institutional church, which causes Berry to miss out on interpretations of the scriptures that are nearly as old as the church itself. 

via erb.kingdomnow.org

Wendell Berry noted in "The New World of William Carlos Williams"

Why is it, then, that almost fifty years after his death, the reputation of William Carlos Williams still seems to be haunted by a ghost of uncertainty? You don’t have to read far in “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You,” Herbert Leibowitz’s assiduous new commentary on Williams’s “life and works,” before you hear its moans. “During his lifetime Williams had the pleasure of becoming a beloved figure,” writes Leibowitz, the founder and longtime editor of the journal Parnassus. But

voices of dissent rang out from the choir loft, basically rehearsing the accusations that he lacked the rudiments of technique or an understanding of form, that he was a sentimentalist and a shallow thinker, and, most damaging of all, that his quest for a uniquely American poem grounded in speech was a foolish enterprise, doomed to fail.

In the poet Wendell Berry’s The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, a brief personal tribute to a writer Berry counts as a major influence, the same undermining voices are invoked: “I would hear, sometimes from older writers I admired, judgments such as ‘I love Bill Williams, but he has no mind,’” Berry writes. “Late into the drafting of this book I still felt the need to begin by defending him,” before realizing that “defense was not necessary.”

via www.nybooks.com

from "Suffering Unto Salvation in Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow"

As love stories go, Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow is pretty strange. The title character, an introverted, balding ­bachelor-barber, watches as Mattie Keith Chatham, an attractive neighbor-girl, grows up; marries a local basketball star; bears, rears, and begins burying their children; ages; and dies. One of my more cynical students, disturbed by Jayber’s fascination with someone so much younger than he, described him as a stalker. Used to romances in which the boy gets the girl, or vice versa, this student and some of the others with whom I’ve read Berry’s novel don’t know what to make of it. I have to work hard to convince some of them that Jayber is not a stalker but a suffering saint. In this sense, the novel Jayber Crow is a passion narrative.

via www.valpo.edu

Click the "via" link to read the complete article.

Reflecting on "The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford"

William Carlos Williams of Rutherford New Jersey?  Berry has the eyes to see (and apparently those schooled in mid-20th century poetry know this) that WCW was, in fact, an oddball of sorts: he wrote about common people in a real location, allowing his participation in the local neighborhood--his work, his friends, his neighbors, his church--to influence (indeed, to become to subject of) his extraordinary poems.  He was belittled for this by the hot shots, and this is, of course, a part of the story.  Berry took great inspiration in this (I wondered, to be honest, why William Carlos Williams wasn't in Imagination in Place as he seemed to exemplify that book's thesis. Now we know---Berry was doing a whole book on this same theme that structures Imagination in Place, using WCW as the great example.)

 I should say that it is only my lack of vocabulary that causes me to say Berry is "using" WCW as an "example."  Berry is more subtle than that, more nuanced and insightful and kind.  But, still, the Borger short-hand being what it is, I'd explain the book like this: he illustrates how a sense of place (in this case Rutherford and Paterson NJ) shaped and influenced and became fodder for the great work of this too often misunderstood poet and doctor, the fascinating William Carlos Willliams.  And how Berry himself does that in his own Kentucky homeland, drawing inspiration from Dr. Williams.

via www.heartsandmindsbooks.com

Review of "Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven's Earthly Life"

This book is not a critical analysis of Wendell Berry's writing. Instead, the informative introduction and 14 essays are from the Christian community of professors, pastors, farmers, an attorney, a physician and a musician who recognize God in Berry's work. The selections show Berry's primary belief that God remains “present to the world through our work,” and that living, loving and dying within the membership of community is “the ultimate fulfillment of God's intent for creation.”

via www.courier-journal.com