New Collected Poems

April 23, 2012
“What must a man do to be at home in the world?” Berry asks early in this big, thick new volume: he has found decades of international fame by providing, in poems, fiction, memoirs, and essays, his clear and consistent answers. Widely admired as a writer and as an environmental advocate since the 1960s, Berry continues to operate the Kentucky farm where his father and grandfather lived; he recommends, always, rural self-reliance, devoted to his own green place, to his wife and their household, and to his version of Christian belief. Irregular free verse connects Berry to William Carlos Williams, while ringing credos suggest William Stafford or Mary Oliver: “the seed doesn’t swell/ in its husk by reason, but loves/ itself, obeys light which is/ its own thought.” This volume makes Berry’s first Collected since 1987 and draws on volumes up through Leavings (2010); standout new efforts include a long elegy for Berry’s father and a set of haiku-sized poems. Benedictions and prayers coexist with manifestos and georgic, the ancient genre of poems about rural hard work. His antiwar sentiment dates from the Vietnam era and modulates into heartfelt attacks on modernity, on “dire machines that run/ by burning the world’s body and/ its breath.” Yet the dominant notes are appreciation and praise: for his wife, for his sense of wisdom, for “the pastures deep in clover and grass,/ enough and more than enough.”

Starred review from April 1, 2012
So eloquent and substantial are Berry's fiction and essays that his poetry can seem ancillary. Read in chronology and near-completely in this volume, however, his verse shines out as the radiant heart of his prophetic art. He has been the foremost American poet of place, which for him means the Kentucky farming community in which he has lived and worked as farmer-writer in the tradition of Hesiod and Virgil, demonstrating the propriety and the virtue of living with the land and its creatures and arguing vehemently and cogently for the integrity of agriculture as the basis of human thriving. Berry's poems initially show him discovering his understanding of the world and human livelihood and then how that understanding works out in the lives of his family and community members; that is, in farming as a calling, a tradition, and a passion. Yes, nature is often his subject, but death is his most frequent concern, which he probes and ponders until there is nothing fearsome left in it. As his poetic career progresses, cogitation decreases, storytelling increases, and, most lately, epigram burgeons with stinging and amusing effectiveness. Moreover, reading his poems is like drinking fresh springwater.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)