Peace of Wild Things & Other Poems, The
Peace of Wild Things & Other Poems, The
Joyous, sensuous, radical- a slim volume of Wendell Berry's best-loved poems to console and delight.
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.
You can read a little each day which is helpful in these times of global destruction and pandemic. So much of the poetry is about the earth, the soil that we live on. We don’t often have the chance to reflect on these details of the landscape. Berry’s dedication to his rural Kentucky is something we can store up and use to examine the irreplaceable natural beauty of our own place.
“The watcher comes, knowing the small
knowledge of his life in this body
in this place In this world.”
Sabbath Poems XX111.
