The
idea of “Sabbath” has always meant or implied rest. From its first recording in
Genesis 1, through the conflicts described in the Gospels between Jesus and the
Pharisees and teachers of law, right down to our more secular notions of “sabbatical,”
rest has always been central in any discussion or understanding of “Sabbath.”
And
so it is in Wendell Berry’s This
Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems, published in 2013 (and often
paired with his New
Collected Poems published earlier last year). Of course, with Berry,
everything is of a piece. As he notes in his introduction, he spends traditional
Sabbaths in the old family church, unless the weather is good, or even
tolerable. Then he heads for the woods and fields near his home in Kentucky,
and discovering the reality of the Sabbath (and perhaps worship) just as much
as he does sitting in a pew. Perhaps more.
This
is not the first time Berry has published a collection of Sabbath poetry. The heart
of the new collection is poems from A
Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.
You
read a collection like This Day, and
you quickly learn how critically important the idea is in the poet’s
understanding of nature, the land, God, aging, humanity, industrial
civilization, and agriculture.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Photograph by Marina Shemesh via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
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