Wendell Berry’s collected Sabbath poems span over forty-four years, from 1979 to 2023. These poems are a record of Berry’s Sunday morning habit, walking his small hillside farm in Kentucky, and, if inspiration strikes, writing a poem about his thoughts. Berry explains that he is a “bad-weather churchgoer,” preferring, when the Sunday weather is nice, to be out walking in the woods, over hills, and along streams. On these Sabbath walks, he experiences a freedom from expectations – other people’s and also his own. “I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays,” writes Berry, “and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration.” 

In these poems, Berry shows us how to access other layers of time beyond our restless, ordinary temporality.