From the back cover of Sabbaths:

Another Sunday morning comes
And l resume the standing Sabbath
Of the woods, where the finest blooms
Of time return . . .

Written in the solitude of his hillside study over seven years of Sabbaths, Wendell Berry's most formal poetic work to date is a sequence of traditional and classic meditations, spanning the years 1979 to 1985. Always firmly centered, here Mr. Berry's poetry achieves a form and vocabulary of extraordinary balance and clarity. These are poems of deep spirituality, meshing the metaphysical and the natural world.

Mr. Berry's attention has often been turned toward contemplation of the individual's place within a community and the necessity for understanding the interdependence of all things; Sabbaths, too, shares these concerns. Just as each individual makes up a vital portion of a community's whole, so these solitary celebrations connect themselves to the world from which they arose, gently and eloquently urging the reader to question his own place and time. Mr. Berry's poems, the Christian Science Monitor has written, "shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of his life," and the work collected in Sabbaths exemplifies such praise.

From the back cover of A Timbered Choir:

"Thoreau would be gratified by A Timbered Choir. Here are Sabbath Poems that praise the given life." Lexington Herald-Leader

"Berry's craftsmanship remains impeccable. Few other poets have such chaste and precise diction or manage line and stanza with such unaffected serenity." Booklist

"In an era of poetry written for tenure committees or for mere vanity, poetry praised for careerist or for idiosyncratic reasons, Berry's work leaps out as the unclassifiable, glorious exception." Philadelphia Inquirer

For more than two decades, Wendell Berry has spent his Sunday mornings in a walking meditation, observing the world through his poetry. A Timbered Choir gathers all of these singular works to date, embracing that which is elemental to human life - beauty, death, peace, and hope.

That is the vision, seen
As on a Sabbath walk;
The possibility
Of human life whose terms
Are of heaven's and this earth's.

Wendell Berry has won the affection of a broad public. He is beloved for his quiet, steady explorations of nature, his emphasis on finding good work to do in the world, and his faith in the solace of family, memory and community.