Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, Bookstore Closings, Grief

Jayber Crow broke my heart in exactly the way I needed it to be broken, allowing my changing-times sadness and confusion to flow.

Jayber’s growth of soul as he narrates his life from 1914 to 1986 (being Port William’s barber for 32 of those years) grew on me.

If you’ve been grieving the losses that have come with a modernized, technologically driven age, Wendell Berry can’t get the gifts of the past back for you, but he can help you honor them with an unsentimental grief.

He can help your soul to grow through facing those losses with an honest remembering and gratitude. He can help you consider what changes you might make in order live at least a little closer to what you believe.

Berry can even help you see your need to forgive yourself along with everyone else who, in greater or lesser degrees, allowed the lessening of localism and the desecration of the land to happen.

Read all of  "Becoming Rememberers: How Wendell Berry Helps Us Grieve Our Time’s Tragic Tradeoffs" by Peggy Haslar at Sparrowfare.

Larkspur Press publishes Wendell Berry's Sabbaths 2016

Mr. Gray Zeitz's long-running letterpress project at Larkspur Press has delivered another volume of recent poems, Sabbaths 2016. Like so many other Larkspur/Berry editions, the book includes several wood engravings by Wesley Bates, whose work was featured in the recent film Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry.

The fifteen Sabbath poems here include "What Passes, What Remains," a longer narrative poem that was first published in The Art of Loading Brush (Counterpoint, 2017). Other poems from 2016 have been published in Oxford American, Spring 2018.

See Sabbaths 2016 and other Larkspur titles HERE.

The Wendell Berry Catalogue from Counterpoint

Counterpoint Press has published their catalogue of the complete works of Wendell Berry. It is a pdf file that contains not just descriptions of the individual titles but also includes brief notes by Jack Shoemaker, Alice Waters, and independent booksellers Kris Kleindienst (Left Bank Books, St. Louis) and Michael Boggs (Carmichaels Bookstore, Louisville).

Shoemaker suggests a reason for Mr. Berry's ongoing appeal to readers:

Wendell never preaches. He simply speaks from the heart a truth he knows too well. I think that’s why over the years we have sold tens of thousands of his titles to young people. They know there is something rotten in what we have done to nature, what we continue to do, and they are looking for someone who can articulate and focus that feeling. They leave one of his readings or talks realizing that this magical, mystical force we call nature is simply a house in which we are guests—and we must care for it because there are new guests arriving daily.

Visit Counterpoint Press. See The Wendell Berry Catalogue (pdf).