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The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
2018
A collection of essays celebrating the cultural heritage of history and home argues that arrogance must be abandoned in favor of respect and care for oneself, one's neighbors, and the land.
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The Art of Loading Brush:New Agrarian Writings
Wendell Berry
2017
Wendell Berry's profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this new gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of Agrarian philosophy. Mr. Berry believes that American cultural problems are nearly always aligned with their agricultural problems, and recent events have shone a terrible spotlight on the divides between our urban and rural citizens. Our communities are as endangered as our landscapes. There is, as Berry outlines, still much work to do, and our daily lives--in hope and affection -- must triumph over despair. Mr. Berry moves deftly between the real and the imagined. The Art of Loading Brush is an energetic mix of essays and stories, including "The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age," which explores Agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World" is added here as the bookend of this developing New Agrarianism. Four stories from an as-yet-unfinished novel, better described as "an essay in imagination," extend the Port William story as it follows Andy Catlett throughout his life to this present moment. Andy works alongside his grandson in "The Art of Loading Brush," one of the most moving and tender stories of the entire Port William cycle. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.
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A Small Porch : Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with the Presence of Nature in the Natural World
Wendell Berry
2016
More than thirty-five years ago, when the weather allowed, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks arranged themselves into poems and each year since he has completed a sequence dated by the year of its composition. Last year we collected the lot into a collection, This Day, the Sabbath Poems 1979-2013. This new sequence for the following year is one of the richest yet. This group provides a virtual syllabus for all of Mr. Berry’s cultural and agricultural work in concentrated form. Many of these poems are drawn from the view from a small porch in the woods, a place of stillness and reflection, a vantage point “of the one/life of the forest composed/of uncountable lives in countless/years each life coherent itself within/ the coherence, the great composure, of all.”--From the publisher
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Roots to the Earth
Wendell Berry
2016
In 1995, Wendell Berry's Roots to the Earth was published in portfolio form by West Meadow Press. The wood etchings of celebrated artist and wood engraver, Wesley Bates, were printed from the original wood blocks on handmade Japanese paper. In 2014, this work was reprinted along with additional poems. Together with Bates' original wood engravings, and designed by Gray Zeitz, Larkspur Press printed just one hundred copies of this book in a stunning limited edition. Now it is with great pleasure that Counterpoint is reproducing this collaborative work for trade publication, as well as expanding it with the inclusion of a short story, "The Branch Way of Doing," with additional engravings by Bates. In his introduction to the 2014 collection, Bates wrote: "As our society moves toward urbanization, the majority of the population views agriculture from an increasingly detached position ... In his poetry [Berry] reveals tenderness and love as well as anger and uncertainty ... The wood engravings in this collection are intended to be companion pieces to ... the way he expresses what it is to be a farmer."
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Our Only World: Ten Essays
Wendell Berry
2015
In this new collection of ten essays, Berry confronts head-on the necessity of clear thinking and direct action. Never one to ignore the present challenge, he understands that only clearly stated questions support the understanding their answers require. For more than fifty years we've had no better spokesman and no more eloquent advocate for the planet, for our families, and for the future of our children and ourselves.
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This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems
Wendell Berry
2013
For nearly thirty-five years, Wendell Berry has been at work on a series of poems occasioned by his solitary Sunday walks around his farm in Kentucky. From riverfront and meadows, to grass fields and woodlots, every inch of this hillside farm lives in these poems, as do the poet’s constant companions in memory and occasion, family and animals, who have with Berry created his Home Place with love and gratitude.
There are poems of spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics that include some of the most beautiful domestic poems in American literature, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials. -
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership
Wendell Berry
2012
A collection of twenty short stories about Port William, a mythical town on the banks of the Kentucky River, populated over the years by a cast of unforgettable characters living in a single place over a long time
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It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays
Wendell Berry
2012
When he accepted the invitation to deliver The Jefferson Lecture—our nation’s highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement—Wendell Berry decided to take on the obligation of thinking again about the problems that have engaged him throughout his long career. He wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair and healing even in these times of Late Capitalism and its destructive contagions. As a poet and writer he understood already that much can be gleaned from looking at the vocabulary of these problems themselves and how we describe them. And he settled on “affection” as a method of engagement and solution.
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New Collected Poems
Wendell Berry
2012
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.
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The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
Wendell Berry
2011
Acclaimed essayist and poet Wendell Berry was born and has always lived in a "provincial" part of the country without an established literary culture. In an effort to adapt his poetry to his place of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry discovered an enduringly useful example in the work of William Carlos Williams. In Williams' commitment to his place of Rutherford, New Jersey, Berry found an inspiration that inevitably influenced the direction of his own writing.
Both men would go on to establish themselves as respected American poets, and here Berry sets forth his understanding of that evolution for Williams, who in the course of his local membership and service, became a poet indispensable to us all. -
Imagination in Place: Essays
Wendell Berry
2010
In Imagination in Place, we travel to the local cultures of several writers important to Berry's life and work, from Wallace Stegner's great West and Ernest Gaines' Louisiana plantation life to Donald Hall's New England, and on to the Western frontier as seen through the Far East lens of Gary Snyder. Berry laments today's dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and literary sense.
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Leavings: Poems
Wendell Berry
2010
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.
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What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth
Wendell Berry
2010
Wendell Berry offers essays from over the last 25 years, alongside new essays about the recent economic collapse, including "Money Versus Goods" and "Faustian Economics," treatises of great alarm and courage. He offers advice and perspective that should be heeded by all concerned as our society attempts to steer from its present chaos and recession to a future of hope and opportunity. With urgency and clarity, Berry asks us to look toward a true sustainable commonwealth, grounded in realistic Jeffersonian principles applied to our present day.
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Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
Wendell Berry
2009
Long before organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Wendell Berry was farming and writing with the purity of food in mind. For the last five decades, he has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of Berry's influence, Michael Pollan offers an introduction to this new collection. "To read the essays in this sparkling anthology," he writes, "many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, is to realize just how little of what we are saying and hearing today Wendall Berry hasn't already said, bracingly before."
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The Mad Farmer Poems
Wendell Berry
2008
During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he's found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings-these are often funny in spite of themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as he is regrettable.
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Window Poems
Wendell Berry
2007
Composed while Wendell Berry looked out the multipaned window of his writing studio, this early sequence of poems contemplates Berry’s personal life as much as it ponders the seasons he witnessed through the window.
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Andy Catlett: Early Travels
Wendell Berry
2006
At nine years old, Andy Catlett takes his first journey by himself, by bus, to visit his grandparents during the Christmas of 1943.
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Blessed are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings About Love, Compassion and Forgiveness
Wendell Berry
2005
For two thousand years, artists, social and cultural activists, politicians and philosophers, humanists and devoted spiritual seekers have all looked to the sayings of Jesus for inspiration and instruction. Unfortunately, on occasions too frequent and destructive to enumerate, the teachings of Christ have been either ignored or distorted by the very people calling themselves Christian. Today, we see a vigorous movement in America fueled by a politicized and engaged portion of the electorate involved in just such ignorance and distortion. Whether directed towards social intolerance or attitudes of warlike aggression, these right-wing citizens have claimed a power of influence that far exceeds their numbers.
This small book collects the sayings of Jesus, selected by Mr. Berry, who has contributed an essay of introduction. Here is a way of peace as described and directed by the greatest spiritual teacher in the West. This is a book of inspiration and prayerful compassion, and we may hope a ringing call to action at a time when our country and the world it once led stand at a dangerous crossroads. -
Given: Poems
Wendell Berry
2005
For the past 25 years award-winning writer Wendell Berry has been at work on "The Sabbath Poems," resulting from his Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation. Poems from the past eight years of these walks are included in Given. Also featured is "Sonata at Payne Hollow," a play in verse that is a startling evocation of the lives of the painters Harlan and Anna Hubbard. The other half of this collection contains shorter occasional pieces, from political poems to folk sayings, love poems to celebrations.
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The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays
Wendell Berry
2005
In a democratic commonwealth, what are the costs and consequences of rugged individualism? What, in the fullest sense, is involved in our National Security? When considering Weapons of Mass Destruction, does our inventory include soil loss, climate change, and ground water poisoning? And should we add Economic Weapons of Mass Destruction to our list of targets? Whose freedom are we considering when we speak of the "free market" or "free enterprise"? What is the price of ownership without affection? These and several other questions lie at the heart of Wendell Berry's latest collection of essays, writing "motivated by fear of our violence to one another and to the world, and my hope that we might do better." Setting aside abstraction in favor of clarity, coherence, and passion, this new book provides a setting of immediate danger and profound hope.
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Hannah Coulter: A Novel
Wendell Berry
2004
In the latest installment in Wendell Berry's long story about the citizens of Port William, Hannah Coulter remembers. Her first husband, Virgil, was declared "missing in action" shortly after the Battle of the Bulge, and after she married Nathan Coulter about all he could tell Hannah about the Battle of Okinawa was "Ignorant boys, killing each other." The community was stunned and diminished by the war, with some of its sons lost forever and others returning home determined to carry on. Now, in her late seventies, twice-widowed and alone, Hannah sorts through her memories: of her childhood, of young love and loss, of raising children and the changing seasons. She turns her plain gaze to a community facing its long deterioration, where, she says, "We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other." Hannah offers her summation: her stories and her gratitude, for the membership in Port William, and for her whole life, a part of the great continuum of love and memory, grief and strength.
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Citizenship Papers: Essays
Wendell Berry
2003
The novelist, poet, and essayist presents a collection of twenty essays that offer everything from critiques of the American experience to a celebration of ordinary lives to a determined warning about the future of the country.
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The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
2002
Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes—an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geo-biography—these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture.
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Three Short Novels
Wendell Berry
2002
Furthering his series on the denizens of Port William, Three Short Novels brings together some of Wendell Berry's best-loved shorter novels--Nathan Coulter, Remembering , and A World Lost . When Nathan Coulter first appeared in 1960, no one could have known that this exquisite coming-of-age tale was introducing us to one of our most distinctive fictional communities: Port William, Kentucky.
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