There are some good people left – Some very good people

Author Wendell Berry, a Kentucky native who turned 90 years old on 8/5/24, studied at Stanford University, visited Tuscany for a year as a Guggenheim fellow, and then taught at New York University for two years.

An invitation to teach at the University of Kentucky, however, carried him back home. He bought a farm near Port Royal, on land adjacent to a farm that had been in his mother’s family, and pursued his vocation as a writer. Many of his contemporaries told him he was throwing away a writing career by moving from New York City back to rural Kentucky.

“The last thing I learned in New York was that I was ruining myself by leaving. I was under thirty, still. People I respected were saying, ‘Here you are, in the literary capital of the universe, and you’ve got a good job and you’re meeting other writers.’ And so I came back here with some fear and trembling, but also a sense of doing the right thing. People give us credit for knowing what we were doing. We didn’t. We came back here because we wanted to. The justification has come in the form of a kind of happiness, but we didn’t anticipate that.”

Berry has proved the doubters wrong, going on to international renown, authoring over 50 books to date, from fiction to essays to poetry, including the poetry collection “Another Day” in August 2024.

—The New Yorker, Poetry Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities.

Wendell Berry’s first new poetry collection since 2016, this new selection of Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials.

“Berry conveys so perfectly the overlapping emotions of love and grief that, at times, I read through tears . . . These poems offer gifts of vision, of knowing that there is another way to live now on this Earth: a way that honors love, the land, and all beings.”

—Barbara J. King, NPR

[Ken writes] I am so inspired I have just ordered Sabbath Poems for myself. Looking forward to settling in with them on this stormy sabbath.