★★★★★ | Epics and Poetry | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I took a long while to read this short book of poems. It’s a collection of Berry’s poems from the mid-1960s through 2016.
Themes:
- The sanctity of nature.
- The evil of technology and the destruction of nature.
- Being present in nature.
- We are part of the natural world, we come from it and return to it.
- Worry over the lives of our children and grandchildren.
Highlights
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
The Peace of Wild Things:
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.