The Heart Has Survived: A Book Review of Another Day by Wendell Berry

By Matt Wheeler

“An act of kindness is not an advance, not progress, but only a triumph. The unfound organ we call ‘the heart’ has survived another day.”

-Sabbath Poem “2019, I” by Wendell Berry

A slower pace of life opens the door to being truly present to people and to place. The practice of intentionally looking and seeing the wonders God has built into the world around us encourages us to allow ourselves moments of undistracted focus. Living well isn’t a matter of cold efficiency and logic. The wise words of Wendell Berry in the masterful Sabbath Poem quoted above serve as a continuing answer to the question “What Are People For?”, as the title of a Berry essay goes, and they do well to set the tone of Another Day, Berry’s newest brilliant collection of poetic gems.

Wendell Berry, the Kentuckian author and poet, is perhaps best known for his novels, including Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, and short stories that center on the life and membership of the fictional rural Kentucky town of Port William—a close counterpart to the real town of Port Royal, Kentucky, where Berry grew up and lives. His essays are another stream of his work that has won him acclaim and readers. In 1977’s The Unsettling of America, he sounded an alarm on our society’s estrangement from the land, and his observations there are as timely now as they were then, if not more so. But Berry’s poetry reads like a personal journal, diary entries about snippets of deep ponderings and brief chronicles of beauty. I’ve written elsewhere about Berry’s Mad Farmer poems, and while they certainly do offer a window into Berry’s thoughts, perhaps especially his grievances, his Sabbath Poems are where we find him at his most contemplative, and perhaps most accessible.

The Sabbath Poems are a running series of articulate reflections that Wendell Berry has composed irregularly throughout his writing career. These treasures are so named because Berry writes them on Sunday walks in the Kentucky countryside that he calls home. Part of what makes this particular collection of Sabbath Poems, titled Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023, especially remarkable is that they were released the day after Berry’s 90th birthday.

Another Day is the fittingly named follow-up to Wendell Berry’s 2013 poetry collection This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems. The poems are untitled other than the year they were written and the Roman numeral that shows their order in the sequence of Sabbath Poems written that year. While the poems in this more compact volume are on a variety of topics, there are four distinct themes that emerge: the history of Berry’s place, the natural world, devotion to God, and marking special occasions. This review will examine each of these categories in turn.

A prevailing thread in Berry’s work is a respect for the history of his place and for formative moments in the lives of its people, and that comes through as one of the main themes in Another Day. Perhaps the most touching and telling of this is “2013, IV”, where Berry relates an autobiographical story from his youth. In it, a young Wendell Berry was with his grandparents on a wintry evening: “The three of them were a nucleus, a part of life, within the light within the warm room within the winter dark…while they ate almost in silence their frugal meal.” The boy Berry, “small for his age but in ambition large”, wanted the duty of carrying the oil lamp. When the lamp burned his hand, he dropped it, and there was a sharp moment of fear for all three of them. His grandparents sprang into action to put out the fire, and “there came a tenderness then, rising out of peril and their fear. They laid their old hands upon the hurt young flesh of the boy, touching through time the life beyond their lives.” Readers of the Port William membership novels and short stories will be glad to see old friends appear in “2016, VIII”, as Berry tells a story of bachelor brother farmers Arthur and Martin—or Art and Mart—Rowanberry. While “their numberless disappeared footsteps are traceable now only by the remaining few who remember the last of them,” the poet affectionately remembers the beloved real people that the fictional Rowanberrys represent.

Berry shows a clear respect for the natural world and takes great pleasure in it throughout his writings, this is on display most keenly in his Sabbath poems. In the poems, nature is a place of rest, a solace from the hurried and wasteful forces of a society gone off the rails. The poem “2013, X” evokes Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” with the opening lines, “Greatly troubled in his mind, he went to a place in the woods where not a leaf was moving” and concluding that those precious moments of peace “would stay with him and comfort him in whiles that would come after.” The poem “2016, I”, in its entirety, has this to say: “One white anemone, the year’s first flower, saves the world.” On the other end of the length spectrum, “2014, VIII”– subtitled “A Small Porch in the Woods”, which sounds like a reference to the riverside “Long-Legged House” that was the subject of a 1969 essay and that has been his workspace for so many of his great works, is a 24-part rumination on nature. In “2017, XI”, Berry offers a concise explanation for why nature inspires so much of his writing, especially his poetry: “After many meetings, much talk, return to the company of trees…the great silence that speaks for itself, until in answer a living word may come, lighting on the opened page.”

Perhaps the most surprising and refreshing of the themes in Another Day is that of tender devotion. Wendell Berry’s Port William characters tend to believe in God but have complicated relationships with the institutional church. It stands to reason that perhaps Berry himself is showing through in that. But Another Day features some of Berry’s most forthright declarations and contemplations on God’s character and work. In “2013, XI”, Berry proclaims, “Thine is yet the greater silence, the greatest, Thine only, in which all commotions and all cries subside, are hushed, and come to rest.” In “2017, X”, Berry tells us, “The world thrives as God’s gift within gratitude.” And he pulls together his strong belief in stewarding Creation in “2019, XVI”: “Thy narrow gate is a wide width thy homely creatures pass freely through…Only we unholy humans find it narrow as we hope to slip out loaded with rotting fruit, some we should have eaten and given the rest away.”

The fact that Berry regularly marks his wife Tanya’s birthday and wedding anniversary with poems is an endearing personal touch. These poems are easy to spot, as the birthday poems have a date stamp of April 30th of the specific year, and the anniversary poems are dated May 29th. In the birthday poem “2018, II”, Berry writes, “The old dog lies in the sun out of the wind, dreams and is warm. So it is with me because you were born.” And he pays tribute to the enduring love between him and his wife Tanya in “2022, I”: “But the old man knows, contrarily, that this world was made by love. He knows it because that love came to him one time in the person of a girl and abides in the girl’s great-grandmotherhood.”

Not every poem fits into these central themes. The tone of grievance in “2014, II” is addressed “to the National Overseers” and features the lines, “Don’t try to call. I have no phone. There’s not much left I want to shoot but I would like to shoot a drone.” Essentially, this could well be a Mad Farmer poem. But time after time in this collection, Berry revisits the topics of history, nature, devotion, and celebration of time-tested love between him and his wife.

Mary Oliver wisely advised, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Wendell Berry has been living out those ideas consistently for decades, and this collection is a distillation of the poet’s musings and sage wisdom. If you’re an avid reader of Berry’s work, this work will come as a welcome arrival, a visit with an old friend. If you haven’t read Wendell Berry’s poetry before, Another Day is a lovely and approachable place to start. I suggest reading them slowly, allowing yourself to take in Berry’s good words and to heed his call to be present.

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A troubadour, poet with a guitar, & stage banter-conversationalist, Matt Wheeler lives in Lancaster County, PA with his wife & teenage son. He specializes in songs based on classic works of literature - his 2021 album "Wonder of It All", featuring songs & stories based on books including "The Horse & His Boy" & "Watership Down" is an example. His most recent album, "A Hard History of Love" is based on Wendell Berry's short stories. You can check out more of his work at www.mattwheeleronline.com.