A review by toniapeckover
A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 by Wendell Berry

4.0

I started this book with the essay at the back and then read the poetry and I'm glad I did because it makes Berry's poetry more explicit and meaningful. His essay, "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation" concerns our western understanding of Nature as first a kind of diety - or at least an active Personality - as illuminated by Chaucer, Spenser and Alan of Lille and later as a benign, general presence to which we escape from the "real" world. He explains how this change in understanding leads to the systems we have now that are concerned only with money making and lead to the destruction of our own homes and places. "I have no doubt at all that even if the global climate were getting better, our abuses of the land would still be the disaster most seriously threatening to the survival of humans and other creatures. Land abuse, I know, is pretty much a global phenomenon. But it is not happening in the whole world as climate change happens in the whole sky. It is happening, because it can happen, only locally, in small places, where the people who commit the abuses also live. And so my question has been, and continues to be, What can cause people to destroy the places where they live...? As always, in both the poetry and the essay, Berry is excellent, consistent and lucid.