Flight from Babel

Standing by Words
by Wendell Berry
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005
(213 pages, $15.00, paperback)

reviewed by Robert Grano

In Standing by Words, first published in 1983 but out of print for over 15 years, Wendell Berry examines the state of language in our culture, finding it wanting in many ways and in many areas. The book contains four short essays on language, marriage, modern poetry, and the relationship between land and community, as well as one collection of “notes” and one long essay, “Poetry and Place,” which takes up almost half of the book.

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Robert W. Grano is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is a regular book reviewer for All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society. He is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy via the Assemblies of God and the Episcopal Church.

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