Aaron Belz

In the latest issue of The City, Aaron Belz reviews The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry. It’s a mostly favorable review, but Belz expresses disappointment that there isn’t more critical engagement with Berry in the volume. Belz only hints at what such a critical engagement might be, noting Berry’s debt to an earlier naturalism. I am not a Berry scholar, but some of Berry’s Sabbath poems have always raised a few questions in my mind about the relationship between God and nature in Berry’s work–poems with lines like these:

Another Sunday morning comes

And I resume the standing Sabbath

Of the woods, where the finest blooms

Of time return, and where not path

Is worn but wears its makers out

At last, and disappears in leaves

Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut

Fills and levels; here nothing grieves

In the risen season. Past life

Lives in the living. Resurrection

Is in the way each maple leaf

Commemorates its kind, by connection

Berry writes within a generally Christian tradition, and he is all the rage these days with all sorts of Christians, hipsters and non-hipsters alike, but I for one would like to learn more about what he means by “Past life / Lives in the living,” or in another poem when he writes that “Sometimes here [earth] / we are there [heaven], and there is no death.”

That “sometimes” is very coy. At the moment, it seems this is the best bet for further study.