Review: The Gospel of Rakes and Rainwater (A Review of Garden Tools By David W. Berner)

By Tessa Klein

David W. Berner’s Garden Tools is a tender, lonesome hymn, a quiet rustling of leaves in the suburbs just before dusk. It is a book of poems that reminds one not so much of poetry as it is often practiced in literary salons, but of lived life, raked leaves, barking dogs, early morning walks, aching knees, and half-remembered dreams that flutter into waking like moths against a screen door.

Berner’s language is not ostentatious. It does not preen. His voice throughout is that of a modest, devout man tending a garden not for admiration but for peace. And that is the distinguishing virtue of Garden Tools: its frank belief in the radiance of the ordinary. There are no cruel games played here, no acrobatics of syntax meant to dazzle or distract. 

Like the best moments of suburban life, those sad and ecstatic instants between the fall of daylight and the rise of the porch light, Berner’s work is fleeting and crystalline. In “The Last Tulip,” we find an almost Chekhovian refusal to bend nature to man’s desires. The tulip does not bloom. It may never. And yet, the failure is not tragic; it is sacred. Berner understands that we are not masters of time—we are guests.

Throughout the book, death is not a sudden intruder but a quiet resident. In “Thinking of My Death,” a sister’s ashes ride in the backseat like a silent conspirator, accompanying him to the gas station and the grocery store, a witness to the mundane routines we assign meaning to in the absence of certainty.

There is a domestic holiness to these pages. “Workshop” is a remembrance of a father’s hands, of the tools that outlive him, tucked away like relics in a shrine no one visits.

Berner is at his most moving when meditating on aging—not with bitterness but with longing and hesitant grace. In these moments, we are not just witnesses to Berner’s world, but to our own youth, retreating.

Garden Tools is not a bombastic debut, but it does not need to be. Like a backyard garden lovingly tended behind a modest house, it blooms on its own terms. In the poetry world, where irony is often the currency, Berner offers sincerity. Where others offer cleverness, he offers clarity.

If there is a flaw to be found, it may be in the consistent gentleness. One begins to long for a storm, for something violent to interrupt the meditative murmur. And yet, this is perhaps an unfair expectation. The book does not aspire to dramatize life, but to understand it—to hold it gently, like one of Berner’s many birds or blossoms, and simply listen.

In the final measure, Garden Tools feels less like a book and more like a neighbor’s voice calling across the hedge: “Isn’t it a beautiful morning?” And you nod. Because it is. And because, as Berner reminds us in poem after poem, there won’t be many more.

Tessa Klein is a Brooklyn-based writer, amateur hypnotist, and former florist. She is currently at work on a memoir about desire, debt, and women who disappear on purpose.