Â
NEW COLLECTED POEMS
Wendell Berry
Â
NEW COLLECTED
POEMS
Wendell Berry
Copyright © Wendell Berry 2012
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN
: 978-1-6190-2047-4
Cover design by Gerilyn Attebery
Interior design by David Bullen
COUNTER POINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
T
O
T
ANYA, AS BEFORE
Contents
Preface: The Country of
Déja Vu
THE BROKEN GROUND (1964)
Elegy
Observance
Boone
Green and White
A Man Walking and Singing
The Companions
The Aristocracy
The Bird Killer
An Architecture
Canticle
Sparrow
A Music
To Go By Singing
The Wild
May Song
The Fear of Darkness
The Plan
The Guest
The Thief
The Broken Ground
FINDINGS (1969)
The Design of the House: Ideal and Hard Time
The Handing Down
Three Elegiac Poems
OPENINGS (1968)
The Thought of Something Else
My Great-Grandfather's Slaves
October 10
The Snake
The Cold
To My Children, Fearing for Them
The Winter Rain
March Snow
April Woods: Morning
The Finches
The Porch over the River
Before Dark
The Dream
The Sycamore
The Meadow
Against the War in Vietnam
Dark with Power
In Memory: Stuart Egnal
The Want of Peace
The Peace of Wild Things
Grace
To Think of the Life of a Man
Marriage
Do Not Be Ashamed
Window Poems
To a Siberian Woodsman
A Discipline
A Poem of Thanks
Envoy
FARMING: A HAND BOOK (1970)
The Man Born to Farming
The Stones
The Supplanting
Sowing
The Familiar
The Farmer Among the Tombs
For the Rebuilding of a House
The Springs
Rain
Sleep
To Know the Dark
Winter Night Poem for Mary
Winter Nightfall
February 2, 1968
March 22, 1968
The Morning's News
Enriching the Earth
A Wet Time
The Silence
In This World
The New Roof
A Praise
On the Hill Late at Night
The Seeds
The Wish to Be Generous
Air and Fire
The Lilies
Independence Day
A Standing Ground
Song in a Year of Catastrophe
The Current
The Mad Farmer Revolution
The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer
The Farmer and the Sea
Earth and Fire
The Mad Farmer in the City
The Birth (Near Port William)
Awake at Night
Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer
The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer
Meditation in the Spring Rain
The Grandmother
The Heron
September 2, 1969
The Farmer, Speaking of Monuments
The Sorrel Filly
To the Unseeable Animal
THE COUNTRY OF MARRIAGE (1973)
The Old Elm Tree by the River
Poem
Breaking
The Country of Marriage
Prayer after Eating
Her First Calf
Kentucky River Junction
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
A Marriage, an Elegy
The Arrival
A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall
The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment
Planting Trees
The Wild Geese
The Silence
Anger Against Beasts
At a Country Funeral
The Recognition
Planting Crocuses
Praise
The Gathering
A Homecoming
The Mad Farmer's Love Song
Testament
The Clear Days
Song
Poem for J.
The Long Hunter
An Anniversary
CLEARING (1977)
History
Where
The Clearing
Work Song
From the Crest
A PART (1980)
Stay Home
To Gary Snyder
For the Hog Killing
Goods
The Adze
The Cold Pane
Falling Asleep
A Purification
A Dance
The Fear of Love
Seventeen Years
To What Listens
Woods
The Lilies
Forty Years
A Meeting
Another Descent
Below
The Star
The Hidden Singer
The Necessity of Faith
To the Holy Spirit
Ripening
The Way of Pain
We Who Prayed and Wept
Grief
Fall
An Autumn Burning
A Warning to My Readers
Creation Myth
The First
Walking on the River Ice
Throwing Away the Mail
Except
For the Future
Traveling at Home
July, 1773
The Slip
Horses
THE WHEEL (1982)
Requiem
Elegy
Rising
Desolation
The Strait
The Law That Marries All Things
Setting Out
Song (1)
From the Distance
Letter
Returning
To Tanya at Christmas
Song (2)
The River Bridged and Forgot
The Gift of Gravity
Song (3)
The Wheel
The Dance
Passing the Strait
Our Children, Coming of Age
Song (4)
In Rain
ENTRIES (1994)
For the Explainers
A Marriage Song
Voices Late at Night
The Record
A Parting
One of Us
Thirty More Years
The Wild Rose
The Blue Robe
The Venus of Botticelli
In a Motel Parking Lot, Thinking of Dr. Williams
To My Mother
On a Theme of Chaucer
The Reassurer
Let Us Pledge
The Vacation
A Lover's Song
Anglo-Saxon Protestant Heterosexual Men
Air
The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union
Duality
The Three
To Hayden Carruth
Noguchi Fountain
Spring
Imagination
For an Absence
The Storm
In Extremis:
Poems about My Father
Epitaph
Come Forth
GIVEN (2005)
Dust
In a Country Once Forested
To Tanya on My Sixtieth Birthday
They
Cathedral
Dante
The Millennium
June Wind
Why
The Rejected Husband
The Inlet
Listen!
In Art Rowanberry's Barn
Burley Coulter's Song for Kate Helen Branch
How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)
Words
To a Writer of Reputation
Seventy Years
A Passing Thought
The Leader
The Ongoing Holy War Against Evil
Some Further Words
Lysimachia Nummularia
LEAVINGS (2010)
Like Snow
On the Theory of the Big Bang as the Origin of the Universe
Look It Over
A Letter (
to Ed McClanahan
)
A Letter (
to my brother
)
A Letter (
to Hayden Carruth
)
A Letter (
to Ernest J. Gaines
)
Give It Time
Questionnaire
And I Beg Your Pardon
David Jones
Tu Fu
A Speech to the Garden Club of America (
With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe
)
While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and BigBangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row
Men Untrained to Comfort
Over the Edge
