SOURCE: “Tangible Mystery in the Poetry of Wendell Berry,” in Wendell Berry, edited by Paul Merchant, Confluence Press, 1991, pp. 184-90.

In the following essay, Johnson contends that Berry's poetry affirms the sacred in the land, creature, and community, offering the reader “an ecology centered in spirit.”

Wendell Berry's writing affirms the intimate partnership between earth and spirit, a bond whose roots are at once biblical—“The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord” (Psalm 33)—and practical, since Berry writes out of, and back to, his long experience of working a Kentucky farm. He is sensitive to the world's body, the deep reserves of meaning growing from the earth into the human mind, heart, and community. His poetry enjoins mystery through a ritual of loving observation, in which work and play are part of the earth and its (human and non-human) creatures. The meaning of ritual can...