Wendell Berry

Nine-year-old Andy Catlett embarks on a trip going alone by bus to visit his grandparents. It is Christmas 1943 and―as he sees modern life crowding out the old ways―those he meets become touchstones for his understanding of a precious and imperiled world. This beautiful short novel is a perfect introduction to Wendell Berry’s rich and ever-evolving saga of the Port William Membership.

A new collection of poems and the companion volume to the popular bestseller This Day , Wendell Berry's Another Day is another stunning contribution to the poetry canon from one of America's most beloved writers A companion to his beloved volume This Day and Wendell Berry's first new poetry collection since 2016, this new selection of Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials. With the publication of this new edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry's work.

Published in 1967, we return to Port William during the Second World War to revisit Jayber Crow, the barber, Uncle Stanley, the gravedigger, Jarrat and Burley, the sharecroppers, and Brother Preston, the preacher, as well as Mat Feltner, his wife Margaret, and his daughter-in-law Hannah, whose son will be born after news comes that Hannah’s husband Virgil is missing. "The earth is the genius of our life,” Wendell Berry writes here. “The final questions and their answers lie serenely coupled in it."

Andy Catlett is nine years old when his Uncle Andrew is murdered and it destroys his sense of the order of things. Wendell Berry tackles the problem of truth and recollection as Andy Catlett gathers the details of this tragedy from the fragile memories of the townspeople. Tenderly, yet with directness, this short novel encompasses a changing way of life at the end of World War II.

None of us, says Wendell Berry, can in a true sense own land. We can only hold it in trust. Clearing is a sequence of poems about the land he and his wife hold in trust: a farm they bought years ago as their abiding place, another they took over more recently to save from ecological disaster. Berry writes, first, of the land’s past, and of its use or abuse by earlier trustees. Then he makes poetry out of his own feeling for the place, and out of his loving labors on it— his efforts to restore it to its old fertility and beauty. Technically, the verse ranges from a kind of cadenced prose, through the open forms of which Berry has long been a master, to the sometimes subtle, sometimes forthright use of rhyme and meter. Clearing is the most considerable volume of poetry yet to have come from an author whose circle of devotees steadily widens.

'As in thought he passes backward into time, the country becomes quieter, and it seems to grow larger. The sounds of engines become less frequent and farther apart until finally they cease altogether. This is the country of his own life and history, fragmentary as they necessarily have been.' On a clear Kentucky night in 1888, a young woman risks her life to save a stranger from a drunken mob. Almost a hundred years later, her great-grandson Andy climbs a hill at the edge of town, and is flooded with memories of all he has lived, seen and heard of the past century - of farmers wooing schoolteachers and soldiers trudging home from war; of the first motor car, the Great Depression and Vietnam; of neighbourly feuds and family secrets; of grief and betrayal - and of great friendship that endures for a lifetime. These are Wendell Berry's tales of Port William, a little farming community nestled deep in the Kentucky River valley. They unravel the story of a town over the course of four generations, lovingly chronicling the intertwined lives of the families who call it home. Affectionate, elegiac and wry, these uplifting rural fables invite us to witness the beauty and quiet heroism at the heart of each ordinary, interconnected life.

Hannah Coulter is Wendell Berry's seventh novel and his first to employ the voice of a woman character in its telling. Hannah, the now-elderly narrator, recounts the love she has for the land and for her community. She remembers each of her two husbands, and all places and community connections threatened by twentieth-century technologies.

Return to Port William, the fictional Kentucky town that’s long been home to Wendell Berry’s autobiographical character Andy Catlett, in the thirteen stories collected here that span the decades from the postwar of the last midcentury to today. The critically acclaimed writer and activist Wendell Berry returns to Port William, the fictional small Kentucky town that forms the basis of his most popular series, with this collection of thirteen new stories. At the age of 80, Andy Catlett is preparing himself to join the whole Membership of Port William, which includes those departed who still seem vividly alive. As Andy looks back on his own life through these thirteen stories that range from his childhood and his earliest memories to the present day, the expansive Port William story reaches a kind of closure, as gaps long untenanted are filled. Taking place from 1945-2001, and containing the fabulous humor and warmth that Berry is known for, How It Went reveals Andy in his most loving and retrospective mood, coming to the end of his own days surrounded by the love and memory of family and friends, living among the living and the dead. Every book of Wendell Berry’s acclaimed Port William Membership stands completely on its own. Even so, as we enter this world, we see characters who leave and who have returned, and we gather a remarkable portrait of a people on the land in a particular place in America.

“This is a book about Heaven,” says Jayber Crow, “but I must say too that . . . I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell.” It is 1932 and he has returned to his native Port William to become the town's barber. Orphaned at age ten, Jayber Crow’s acquaintance with loneliness and want have made him a patient observer of the human animal, in both its goodness and frailty. He began his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College. There, freedom met with new burdens and a young man needed more than a mirror to find himself. But the beginning of that finding was a short conversation with "Old Grit," his profound professor of New Testament Greek. "You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out―perhaps a little at a time." "And how long is that going to take?" "I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps." "That could be a long time." "I will tell you a further mystery," he said. "It may take longer." Wendell Berry’s clear-sighted depiction of humanity’s gifts―love and loss, joy and despair―is seen though his intimate knowledge of the Port William Membership.

No one writes like Wendell Berry. Whether essay, novel, story, or poem, his inimitable voice rings true, as natural as the land he has farmed in Kentucky for over 40 years.Following the widely praised Given, this new collection offers a masterful blend of epigrams, elegies, lyrics, and letters, with the occasional short love poem. Alternately amused, outraged, and resigned, Berry’s welcome voice is the constant in this varied mix. The book concludes with a new sequence of Sabbath poems, works that have spawned from Berry’s Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.Berry’s themes are reflections of his life: friends, family, the farm, the nature around us as well as within. He speaks strongly for himself and sometimes for the lost heart of the country. As he has borne witness to the world for eight decades, what he offers us now in this new collection of poems is of incomparable value.

Here, Wendell Berry revisits for the first time his immensely popular Collected Poems , which The New York Times Book Review described as “a straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament, and family life” and “[returns] American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.” In New Collected Poems , Berry reprints the nearly two hundred pieces in Collected Poems , along with the poems from his most recent collections― Entries , Given , and Leavings ―to create an expanded collection, showcasing the work of a man heralded by The Baltimore Sun as “a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau . . . a major poet of our time.” Wendell Berry is the author of over forty works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. While he began publishing work in the 1960s, Booklist has written that "Berry has become ever more prophetic," clearly standing up to the test of time.

I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free. The poems of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the cycles of nature and the seasons as they ebb and flow. Here is the peace of wild things.

In these six essays, award-winning author Wendell Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever widening cleft between words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals from their communities and of their communities from the land. From the essay, Standing by Words, Berry writes, “Two epidemic illnesses of our time—upon both of which virtual industries of cures have been founded—are the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons. That these two are related (that private loneliness, for example, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough. What seems not so well understood, because not so much examined, is the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language. My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.” Out-of-print for more than fifteen years, Standing by Words offers a masterfully written argument for the literary tradition.

Old Jack, born just after the American Civil War and dying in contemporary times, spends one beautiful September day in Port William, his home since birth, remembering. The story tells of the most searing moments of Old Jack’s life, particularly his debt to his sister Nancy and her husband Ben Feltner, Old Jack’s model of what an honorable manhood and strength might be. "Few novelists treat both their characters and their readers with the kind of respect that Wendell Berry displays in this deeply moving account . . . The Memory of Old Jack is a slab of rich Americana." ― The New York Times Book Review

If you stop and look around you, you'll start to see. Tall marigolds darkening. A spring wind blowing. The woods awake with sound. On the wooden porch, your love smiling. Dew-wet red berries in a cup. On the hills, the beginnings of green, clover and grass to be pasture. The fowls singing and then settling for the night. Bright, silent, thousands of stars. You come into the peace of simple things. From the author of the 'compelling' and 'luminous' essays of The World-Ending Fire comes a slim volume of poems. Tender and intimate, these are consoling songs of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging. They celebrate and elevate what is sensuous about life, and invite us to pause and appreciate what is good in life, to stop and savour our fleeting moments of earthly enjoyment. And, when fear for the future keeps us awake at night, to come into the peace of wild things.

Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, as Berry notes in his Afterword to this third edition, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economic system dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are good people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.

In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities Wendell Berry began his life in post-war America as the old times and the last of the old-time people were dying out, and continues to this day in the old ways: a team of work horses and a pencil are his preferred working tools. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home. With grace and conviction, he shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy—the natural world will not survive it. Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

First published in 1972, “Think Little” is cultural critic and agrarian Wendell Berry at his best: prescient about the dire environmental consequences of our mentality of greed and exploitation, yet hopeful that we will recognize war and oppression and pollution not as separate issues, but aspects of the same. “Think Little” is presented here alongside one of Berry’s most popular and personal essays, “A Native Hill.” This gentle essay of recollection is told alongside a poetic lesson in geography, as Berry explains at length and in detail, that what he stands for is what he stands on.Each palm-size book in the Counterpoints series is meant to stay with you, whether safely in your pocket or long after you turn the last page. From short stories to essays to poems, these little books celebrate our most-beloved writers, whose work encapsulates the spirit of Counterpoint Press: cutting-edge, wide-ranging, and independent.

The fifteen poems and one essay included here, personally selected by Wendell Berry from among his previously published work, quietly and joyously celebrate the enduring satisfactions of good work and a happy home.Traveling at Home opens with “A Walk Down Camp Branch,” an essay in which the author reveals his special sensitivity to nature and his rural Kentucky community. Next are poems from 1957 to 1982 in which Berry establishes his enduring themes—the contemplation of the individual’s place within community and the interdependence of all things. In conclusion is a group of the Sabbath poems in which the poet speaks with reverence and humility of the pains and joys of relationships with the land, with family, and with passing generations.Originally published as a limited edition in 1988, Traveling at Home pairs Mr. Berry’s eloquent writings with John DePol’s exquisite woodcuts. It is one of the most beautiful presentations of this well-loved writer’s work.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement.From the ravages of the global economy to the great pleasures of growing a garden, Wendell Berry's powerful essays represent a heartfelt call for humankind to mend our broken relationship with the earth, and with each other.Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

'Do I wish to keep up with the times? No. My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can' The great American poet, novelist and environmental activist argues for a life lived slowly.