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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 814.54 BER | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Berry's latest collection of essays is the reminiscence of a literary life. It is a book that acknowledges a lifetime of intellectual influences, and in doing so, positions Berry more squarely as a cornerstone of American literature . . . A necessary book. Here, Berry's place as the 'grandfather of slow food' or the 'prophet of rural living' is not questioned. This book ensures we understand the depth and breadth of Berry's art." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"[A] stellar collection . . . Foodies, architects, transportation engineers, and other writers are adopting and adapting [Berry's] concepts, perhaps leading to what he envisions will one day be 'an authentic settlement of our country.'" -- The Oregonian
A writer who can imagine the "community belonging to its place" is one who has applied his knowledge and citizenship to achieve the goal to which Wendell Berry has always aspired--to be a native to his own local culture. And for Berry, what is "local, fully imagined, becomes universal," and the "local" is to know one's place and allow the imagination to inspire and instill "a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves."
In Imagination in Place , we travel to the local cultures of several writers important to Berry's life and work, from Wallace Stegner's great West and Ernest Gaines' Louisiana plantation life to Donald Hall's New England, and on to the Western frontier as seen through the Far East lens of Gary Snyder. Berry laments today's dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and literary sense.
Rich with Berry's personal experience of life as a Kentucky agrarian, the collection includes portraits of a few of America's most imaginative writers, including James Still, Hayden Carruth, Jane Kenyon, John Haines, and several others.
Author Notes
Wendell Berry The prolific poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry is a fifth-generation native of north central Kentucky. Berry taught at Stanford University; traveled to Italy and France on a Guggenheim Fellowship; and taught at New York University and the University of Kentucky, Lexington, before moving to Henry County.
Berry owns and operates Lanes Landing Farm, a small, hilly piece of property on the Kentucky River. He embraced full-time farming as a career, using horses and organic methods to tend the land. Harmony with nature in general, and the farming tradition in particular, is a central theme of Berry's diverse work.
As a poet, Berry gained popularity within the literary community. Collected Poems, 1957-1982, was particularly well-received. Novels and short stories set in Port William, a fictional town paralleling his real-life home town of Port Royal further established his literary reputation. The Memory of Old Jack, Berry's third novel, received Chicago's Friends of American Writers Award for 1975. Berry reached his broadest audience and attained his greatest popular acclaim through his essays. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture is a springboard for contemporary environmental concerns.
In his life as well as his art, Berry has advocated a responsible, contextual relationship with individuals in a local, agrarian economy.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Berry, an outspoken cultural critic, agrarian and prolific author (with more than 50 books), writes that imagination "brings what we want and what we have ever closer to being the same. It is the power that can save us from the prevailing insinuation that our place, our house, our spouse, and our automobile are not good enough." In these 15 essays, culled from the past two decades, Berry consistently backs up this bold statement while discussing everything from the Civil War to Shakespeare to religion. Each piece illustrates Berry's assertion that there is an unbreakable connection between a literary work and the place in which it is conceived; to that end, he examines the influence of place on his own creation, the fictional Kentucky town of Port William, as well as the integral role of the natural world in Shakespeare's As You Like It and King Lear. Some of the selections feel redundant-the point is made time and again that we must cultivate our imaginations in order to exist harmoniously with our surroundings-but this thought-provoking volume does reinforce Berry's relevance as one of America's preeminent thinkers. (Mar.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The essays of Berry's new collection are of two kinds. Most are short appreciations of other writers who have taught him, formally (Wallace Stegner) as well as in the way all writers teach those who respond to them, as exemplary observers of humanity and truth. These small pieces' subjects include, besides novelist Stegner, poets John Haines, Hayden Carruth, and Jane Kenyon; fellow Kentuckians James Still, Gurney Norman, and James Baker Hall (the last a fine photographer, to boot) all personal acquaintances and friends of Berry's California's Buddhist-ecologist bard, Gary Snyder; and the great English poet and scholar of Blake and Yeats, Kathleen Raine, whom he knows primarily from their work. The longer pieces weigh in with congenial gravity on how it has been to live and work in the same place for 40-some years; the effects of the Civil War on literature and public consciousness, especially in his own region, the upper South; self-knowledge and adversity in As You Like It and King Lear; and a typical scientist's rant against theism. The Shakespearean piece, rebutting currently fashionable dark interpretations, particularly of Lear, is very probably destined to be a classic essay, while the concluding defense of belief and science rather obviates one side of the religion-science controversy while demolishing the other.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Imagination in Place | p. 1 |
| American Imagination and the Civil War | p. 17 |
| The Momentum of Clarity | p. 39 |
| In Memory: Wallace Stegner, 1909-1993 | p. 45 |
| Speech After Long Silence | p. 49 |
| My Friend Hayden | p. 55 |
| In Memory: James Still | p. 73 |
| A Master Language | p. 77 |
| My Conversation with Gurney Norman | p. 83 |
| Sweetness Preserved | p. 87 |
| Some Interim Thoughts about Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End | p. 103 |
| In Memory: James Baker Hall | p. 111 |
| Against the Nihil of the Age | p. 115 |
| The Uses of Adversity | p. 141 |
| God, Science, and Imagination | p. 179 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 193 |
| Works Cited | p. 195 |
