Sherry Chandler

I’ll let you decide.

You’ll find a selection of his poetry and a discussion on the Frontline web site here and here.

My thanks to Ann Lederer for pointing these poems out to me. I’m a little late getting to them, having been distracted by a crisis in the foreground of my life.

Shoemaker and Hoard is releasing Given, Wendell Berry’s first book of poetry in ten years. It includes, among other poems, more of the Sabbath poems that have already appeared in previous volumes and a verse play about the lives of Harlan and Anna Hubbard, which was first published as a chapbook.

Ron Silliman has an item about Berry and this new book that pretty much sums up my own feelings about both his strengths and his weaknesses – only much more eloquently and efficiently than I’ve been able to do. Anybody who’s followed this blog for a while knows that I tend to fume at Berry while continuing to read him. It’s sort of like picking at a scab. But Silliman has articulated part of the problem for me and for that I’m grateful:

I have the same problem with his view, ultimately, that I have when watching the films, say, of Michael Moore. To construct their respective world views, they’re required to omit far too many of the details, many of which simply cancel out their reasoning. In Moore’s case, telling what happens to the city of Flint when a factory moves presents a cross-section of a detail taken from a larger, far greater process. Moore’s utopia is the industrial segment of the American Midwest while Berry’s is somewhat closer to an early agrarian view – and the political conclusions they draw are for the most part quite different. But each is largely bemoaning the movement of the world away from what they perceive to have been its optimum moment. Both are telling narratives of decline.

It is well worth reading the entirety of Silliman’s post, just to find out how he weaves “A Prairie Home Companion” and Stalin into his argument. And don’t let the quote above convince you that all Silliman has to say about Berry is negative. Here are his closing words “…but all the ways in which the world fails to adhere to [Berry's] vision of the possible will no doubt continue to fuel some of the saddest, sweetest verse we can get.”

This little poem from Sabbaths (North Point Press, 1987) is almost like something from Blake, and it seems very appropriate to this last week, which has seen the greening of Kentucky just as described here.

from the section titled 1982:

III

The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago,
Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;
The new grass trembles under the wind’s flow.
The flock, barn-weary, comes to it again,
New to the lambs, a place their mothers know,
Welcoming, bright, and savory in its green,
So fully does the time recover it,
Nibbles of pleasure go all over it.