Water at the Roots
Poems and Insights of a Visionary Farmer
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In a society uprooted by two world wars, industrialization, and dehumanizing technology, a revolutionary farmer turns to poetry to reconnect his people to the land and one another.
A farmer, poet, activist, pastor, and mystic, Britts (1917–1949) has been called a British Wendell Berry. His story is no romantic agrarian elegy, but a life lived in the thick of history. As his country plunged headlong into World War II, he joined an international pacifist community, the Bruderhof, and was soon forced to leave Europe for South America.
Amidst these great upheavals, his response – to root himself in faith, to dedicate himself to building community, to restore the land he farmed, and to use his gift with words to turn people from their madness – speaks forcefully into our time. In an age still wracked by racism, nationalism, materialism, and ecological devastation, the life he chose and the poetry he composed remain a prophetic challenge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This evocative collection brings together the poems and essays of British farmer Philip Britts (1907 1949), who led a Bruderhof community of Christian pacifists in Devon, England, before WWII. As Europe plunged into war, Britts moved his pacifist congregation from England to a settlement in Paraguay, where they felt they could live out their ideals of peace. Britts's poems and musings collected here by Harries, a writer who attended his original congregation as a young girl offer a window into a life defined by clear Christian values of radical pacifism, love of neighbor, and care for the Earth. Britts provides a gentle corrective to modern impulses of acquisition and aggression, his ebullient verses always returning to wonder and awe at the natural world: "All life is joy again/ The longest drought shall pass/ Bringeth sweet drenching rain/ Life for the grass." Britts's efforts in Paraguay may strike modern readers as misguided ecologically and socially (he elevates his way of living and farming above that of the locals), but his refusal to participate in WWII and his respect for the South Americans redeem him in the end. Britts's work will be an inspiration for Christians and humanists seeking peace and purpose in a tumultuous world.
