Poetry Friday: Wendell Berry, Rest in Peace

                                                           

first published in the May, 1970 issue of Poetry magazine

"Having worked/I would sleep..." 

Having worked — so hard, for so long, for so many — may he sleep with and in the deepest peace, knowing that he brought so much beauty to the world. 

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026), in addition to his many poems and powerful essays, wrote some of the most beautiful novels I've ever encountered. Here's what I said, ten years back, about Hannah Coulter: 

I finished Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter last week and discovered for myself why my friends, when the title comes up, gasp and seem to rise from the planet for a moment as they relive their own experiences of reading it. When they circle back down to earth and are able to speak again, they always mention underlining, highlighting, and the lyrical beauty of the writing. 

They are right. And I have joined their ranks. 

Title character Hannah Coulter, now in her 70s, is looking back over the years of her life. Hannah shares her history with us in prose that is both simple and reflective. I don't think it's a spoiler to share this passage, which comes very early in the book:  

When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you don't know it.

My copy, with its creased but lovely cover, is full of such underlinings. I read with pencil in hand, marking passage after passage, ripe plums that I wanted to preserve and remember forever. I read Hannah quickly and slowly: flying through the pages, but savoring the words of a world that has passed into memory.

 

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The Poetry Friday round-up this week is being 

hosted by the incomparable Patricia Franz at Reverie.