Window Poems
by Wendell Berry reviewed by Eighth Day Books
Feast of St Job the Prophet
Anno Domini 2020, May 6
Window Poems
by Wendell Berry with wood engravings by Wesley Bates
Written at the Long Legged House (Berry’s cabin by the river), the Window Poems feel like early work—of a man testing himself and earning his way. These twenty-seven short poems follow one on another, rising and ebbing as Berry considers the world outside his window alongside the weight of his own convictions. Though he is widely known for the clear-sightedness of his essays, Wendell Berry has always been a poet. There’s an edge and a vibrance in these poems—a sharp ear for the way words rub and fit—that seem to have softened in his later work:
The wind’s eye
to see into the wind.
The eye in its hollow
looking out
through the black frame
at the waves the wind
drives up the river,
whitecaps, a wild day,
the white sky
traveled by snow squalls,
the trees thrashing,
the corn blades driven,
quivering, straight out.
Yet in keeping with the careful economy he strives to live by, the words are not an end in themselves. They serve to help the writer find his way to meaning and more authentic being in the world he shares with all living things (such as the birds at his feeder):
the man, knowing
the price of seed, wishes
they would take more care.
But they understand only
what is free, and he
can give only as they
will take. Thus they have
enlightened him. He buys
the seed, to make it free.
Originally designed and printed on a handpress with wood engravings accompanying the handset text, the book itself is a testament to Berry’s own attentive habitation.
64 pp. paper $16.95
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