Collected Poems 1957-1982 by Wendell Berry

San Francisco : North Point Press, 1985. First Edition. Hardcover. 268 pages ; 21 cm. Price clipped dust jacket, gift inscription on flyleaf. No markings elsewhere and binding is firm.

The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry 1957-1982

For this volume Wendell Berry has collected poems from his previous eight collections: The Broken Ground, Openings, Findings, Farming: A Hand Book, The Country of"Marriage, Clearing, A PART, and THE WHEEL. Nearly two hundred poems are included from the poet's first twenty-five years of work.

Reviewing Mr. Berry's first volume of poems, The Broken Ground, in The Kenyan Review, Robert Hazel recognized its achievement and its promise when he wrote that it "announces the beginning of a career in poetry that probably will be more durable and on a larger scale than that of any other poet of about thirty years I can see coming up the pike."

In his subsequent collections, Mr. Berry has never abandoned the themes and values introduced in The Broken Ground, choosing instead to refine and develop them. The result, in THE WHEEL, his most recent collection (included here in its entirety) is "precisely balanced and beautifully subtle poems that achieve profundity without pretension and combine delicacy with strength" (Malahat Review).

Mr. Berry is a writer of great clarity and sureness. His love of the language and his care for its music are only matched by his love and care for the subjects he has written about for his entire career: land and nature, the family and community, tradition as the groundwork for life and culture.

Mr. Berry's graceful elegies sit easily alongside lyrics of great humor and biting satire. Husbandman and husband, philosopher and Mad Farmer, he writes of the values that endure, that must endure if we are to survive. His vision is one of determination and faithfulness, of hope and memory and love.

WENDELL BERRY is a Kentuckian who wrote and taught in California and New York before returning permanently to the Kentucky River region where he has lived for two decades, writing and farming on seventy-five acres in Henry County. Mr. Berry has emerged as an eloquent spokesman for conservation, common sense, and "sustainable agriculture," topics he has pursued in The Unsettling of America, THE GIFT OF GOOD LAND, and MEETING THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE LAND, which he co-edited with agricultural researcher Wes Jackson and conservationist Bruce Colman. He has also written of the Kentucky River country in his novels, including NATHAN COULTER and A PLACE ON EARTH. Among his collections of literary essays is STANDING BY WORDS, an exploration of language as both a source of confusion and a means to clarity. North Point Press has also published Mr. Berry's two most recent collections of poetry, A PART, and THE WHEEL.