New Collected Poems
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
A stunning poetry collection from the revered Kentucky poet—featuring nearly 200 poems from his immensely popular collection, plus selections from the critically lauded Entries, Given, and Leavings
“A straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament, and family life.” —New York Times Book Review
In New Collected Poems, Berry reprints the nearly 200 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 40 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What must a man do to be at home in the world?" Berry asks early in this big, thick new volume: he has found decades of international fame by providing, in poems, fiction, memoirs, and essays, his clear and consistent answers. Widely admired as a writer and as an environmental advocate since the 1960s, Berry continues to operate the Kentucky farm where his father and grandfather lived; he recommends, always, rural self-reliance, devoted to his own green place, to his wife and their household, and to his version of Christian belief. Irregular free verse connects Berry to William Carlos Williams, while ringing credos suggest William Stafford or Mary Oliver: "the seed doesn't swell/ in its husk by reason, but loves/ itself, obeys light which is/ its own thought." This volume makes Berry's first Collected since 1987 and draws on volumes up through Leavings (2010); standout new efforts include a long elegy for Berry's father and a set of haiku-sized poems. Benedictions and prayers coexist with manifestos and georgic, the ancient genre of poems about rural hard work. His antiwar sentiment dates from the Vietnam era and modulates into heartfelt attacks on modernity, on "dire machines that run/ by burning the world's body and/ its breath." Yet the dominant notes are appreciation and praise: for his wife, for his sense of wisdom, for "the pastures deep in clover and grass,/ enough and more than enough."
