Wendell Berry, prolific and versatile poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and a dedicated activist, has lived for decades as a writer and small scale farmer on seventy-five acres in Henry County, Kentucky where his ancestors settled in the early 19th century.
Berry has written novels set there, including Hannah Coulter (2004) and A Place on Earth (1967). Along with his many books of poems – among them, Given: New Poems (2005) and The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1998) – he is the author, as well, of many collections of essays, including The Art of the Commonplace: Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002) and What Are People For? (1990). His many books of stories include That Distant Land: The Collected Stories of Wendell Berry (2002).
In 2010, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal. Today and in the days ahead, we will post several characteristically beautiful poems of his, beginning with “The Meadow”:
In the town’s graveyard the oldest plot now frees itself
of sorrow, the myrtle of the graves grown wild. The last
who knew the faces who had these names are dead.
and now the names fade, dumb on the stones, wild
as shadows in the grass, clear to the rabbit and the wren.
Ungrieved, the town’s ancestry fits the earth. They become
a meadow, their alien marble grown native as maple.
(From Collected Poems, 1957-1982 © 1984 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted with kind permission of North Point Press. Photo by Tomas Sobek.)
The Dish 