Stream of meditation

In 1964, Wendell Berry returned for good to Henry County, Kentucky. After spending his mid-20s in the Bay Area, New York and Europe, Berry moved back to his rural homeland -- a choice frowned upon by his literary mentors and friends -- both for the sake of his artistic development and his own sense of himself as a man. He converted an old family fishing cabin on the Kentucky River into a sturdier writing cabin. And there, over the last four decades, he has produced more than 40 books of poetry, fiction and essays and established himself as one of our most essential writers.

Berry’s new collection, “Window Poems” (Shoemaker & Hoard: 80 pp., $23), is a series he composed while looking out the window of his writing cabin. Meditative and personal, they explore many of the themes that appear in Berry’s other work: the power and fragility of the natural world, the relationship between individuals and a larger community, the futility and shortsightedness of so much of human enterprise.

But these poems also reveal a self-doubt and vulnerability that are far removed from the assurance of Berry’s prose. He describes himself as “a wilderness looking out / at the wild” and writes of times he “has borne the hunger to destroy, / riding anger like a captain, / savage, exalted and blind.” And yet sometimes the world gives him such delight that “The day stands apart / from the calendar.”

As James Baker Hall writes in his gorgeous introduction, there is a tension in these poems between the river and the window -- between the natural world and the human need to impose order on the wild.

Berry’s relationship to his native land isn’t free of complication -- like faith, it is something he has to work at. But with this small, enchanting book -- and writing as mindful, unhurried and deeply felt as the simpler way of life that he advocates -- Berry proves beyond doubt that you can go home again. We should all be glad he did.

-- Nina Revoyr