Books by Wendell Berry

Given: Poems

by Wendell Berry

For five decades Wendell Berry has been a poet of great clarity and purpose. He is an award-winning writer whose imagination is grounded by the pastures of his chosen place and the rooms and porches of his family's home. In Given, the work is as rich and varied as ever before. With his unmistakable voice as the constant, he dexterously maneuvers through a variety of forms and themes―political cautions, love poems, a play in verse, and a long series of Sabbath Poems that resulted from Berry's recent Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.
Berry's work is one of devotion to family and community, to the earth and her creatures, to the memories of the past, and the hope of the future. His writing stands alongside the work of William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost as a rigorous American testament.

Given: Poems

by Wendell Berry

A moving collection of poems that celebrate the land, family, and community by one of America’s most acclaimed and beloved writers.
For five decades Wendell Berry has been a poet of great clarity and purpose. He is an award-winning writer whose imagination is grounded by the pastures of his chosen place and the rooms and porches of his family’s home. In Given, the work is as rich and varied as ever before. With his unmistakable voice as the constant, he dexterously maneuvers through a variety of forms and themes―political cautions, love poems, a play in verse, and a long series of Sabbath Poems that resulted from Berry’s recent Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.
Berry’s work is one of devotion to family and community, to the earth and her creatures, to the memories of the past, and the hope of the future. His writing stands alongside the work of William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost as a rigorous American testament.
“Mr. Berry is a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau.” ―The Baltimore Sun
“[Berry’s poems] shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life.” ―The Christian Science Monitor
“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” ―The Bloomsbury Review
“[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” ―Publishers Weekly

Standing by Words: Essays

by Wendell Berry

An urgent, visionary, and heartfelt collection of essays focused on recovering deeper, time-honored values against the ravages of modern society.
. In six elegant, linked literary essays, Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever-widening cleft between the words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals and their communities from the land.
“This skillfully conceived book is one of the strongest contemporary arguments for literary tradition: a challenging credo, un-glib, calmly assured, clearly illuminating―and required reading for those seriously interested in the interplay between literature, ethics, and morality.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” ―Publishers Weekly

Standing by Words: Essays

by Wendell Berry

In six elegant, linked literary essays, Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever-widening cleft between the words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals and their communities from the land.
"This skillfully conceived book is one of the strongest contemporary arguments for literary tradition: a challenging credo, un-glib, calmly assured, clearly illuminating―and required reading for those seriously interested in the interplay between literature, ethics, and morality." ―Kirkus Reviews

Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings About Love, Compassion and Forgiveness

by Wendell Berry

Unfortunately, on occasions too frequent and destructive to enumerate, the teachings of Christ have been either ignored or distorted by the very people calling themselves Christian. Whether directed towards social intolerance or attitudes of warlike aggression, these right-wing citizens have claimed a power of influence that far exceeds their numbers. Blessed Are the Peacemakers collects the sayings of Jesus, selected by Wendell Berry, who contributes an essay of introduction. This is a book of inspiration and prayerful compassion, a ringing call to action at a time when our country and the world it once led stand at a dangerous crossroads.

The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays

by Wendell Berry

A soulful, searching collection of essays that tackle the complexities of contemporary America from “the prophet of rural America” (New York Times).

From the war in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina to the political sniping engendered by Supreme Court nominations—contemporary American society is characterized by divisive anger, profound loss, and danger. Wendell Berry, “the prophet of rural America” (New York Times) and one of the country’s foremost cultural critics, responds with hope and intelligence in a series of essays that tackle the major questions of the day. Whose freedom are we considering when we speak of the free market or free enterprise? What is really involved in our national security? What is the price of ownership without affection? Berry answers in prose that shuns abstraction for clarity, coherence, and passion, giving us essays that may be the finest of his long career. “Everything in the book illumines.” —Booklist

“[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” —Publishers Weekly

“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” —The Bloomsbury Review

The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays

by Wendell Berry

A soulful, searching collection of essays that tackle the complexities of contemporary America from “the prophet of rural America” (New York Times).
From the war in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina to the political sniping engendered by Supreme Court nominations―contemporary American society is characterized by divisive anger, profound loss, and danger. Wendell Berry, “the prophet of rural America” (New York Times) and one of the country’s foremost cultural critics, responds with hope and intelligence in a series of essays that tackle the major questions of the day. Whose freedom are we considering when we speak of the free market or free enterprise? What is really involved in our national security? What is the price of ownership without affection? Berry answers in prose that shuns abstraction for clarity, coherence, and passion, giving us essays that may be the finest of his long career. “Everything in the book illumines.” ―Booklist
“[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” ―The Bloomsbury Review

That Distant Land: The Collected Stories

by Wendell Berry

Originally published in 2005, That Distant Land brings together twenty-three stories from the Port William Membership. Arranged in their fictional chronology, the book is not an anthology so much as it is a coherent temporal mapping of this landscape over time, revealing Berry’s mastery of decades of the life lived alongside this clutch of interrelated characters bound by affection and followed over generations.
This volume combines the stories found in The Wild Birds (1985), Fidelity (1992), and Watch with Me (1994), together with a map and a charting of the complex and interlocking genealogies.

That Distant Land: The Collected Stories

by Wendell Berry

Originally published in 2005, That Distant Land brings together twenty-three stories from the Port William Membership. Arranged in their fictional chronology, the book is not an anthology so much as it is a coherent temporal mapping of this landscape over time, revealing Berry’s mastery of decades of the life lived alongside this clutch of interrelated characters bound by affection and followed over generations.
This volume combines the stories found in The Wild Birds (1985), Fidelity (1992), and Watch with Me (1994), together with a map and a charting of the complex and interlocking genealogies.

Hannah Coulter: A Novel

by Wendell Berry

Hannah Coulter is Wendell Berry’s seventh novel and his first to employ the voice of a woman character in its telling. Hannah, the now-elderly narrator, recounts the love she has for the land and for her community. She remembers each of her two husbands, and all places and community connections threatened by twentieth-century technologies. At risk is the whole culture of family farming, hope redeemed when her wayward and once lost grandson, Virgil, returns to his rural home place to work the farm.

Hannah Coulter: A Novel

by Wendell Berry

Hannah Coulter is Wendell Berry’s seventh novel and his first to employ the voice of a woman character in its telling. Hannah, the now-elderly narrator, recounts the love she has for the land and for her community. She remembers each of her two husbands, and all places and community connections threatened by twentieth-century technologies. At risk is the whole culture of family farming, hope redeemed when her wayward and once lost grandson, Virgil, returns to his rural home place to work the farm.

Citizenship Papers

by Wendell Berry

Citizenship papers, n 1. Materials prepared for presentation to authorities when making an application for citizenship. 2. Documents presented as proof of citizenship.

There are those in America today who seem to feel we must audition for our citizenship, with "Patriot" offered as the badge for those found narrowly worthy. Let this book stand as Wendell Berry’s application, for he is one of those faithful, devoted critics envisioned by the Founding Fathers to be the life’s blood and very future of the nation they imagined. Adams, Jefferson and Madison would have found great clarity in his prose and great hope in his vision. And today’s readers will be moved and encouraged by his anger and his refusal to surrender in the face of desperate odds. Books get written for all sorts of reasons, and this book was written out of necessity.

Citizenship Papers collects nineteen new essays, from celebrations of exemplary lives to critiques of American life, including "A Citizen’s Response [to the new National Security Strategy]"—a ringing call of caution to a nation standing on the brink of global catastrophe.

Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays

by Wendell Berry

In this new collection of essays, Wendell Berry continues his work as one of America’s most necessary social commentators. With wisdom and clear, ringing prose, he tackles head-on some of the most difficult problems which face us as we near the end of the twentieth century.

Berry begins the title essay with the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings as an example of a “process that has been well established and well respected for at least two hundred years—the process . . . of community disintegration.” Community, a “locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature,” bound by trust and affection, is “being destroyed by the desires and ambitions of both private and public life which for want of the intervention of community interests, are also destroying one another.”

He then moves on to elucidate connections between sexual brutality and economic brutality, and the role of art and free speech. Berry forcefully addresses America’s unabashed pursuit of self-liberation, which he says is “still the strongest force now operating in our society.” As individuals turn away from their community, they conform to a “rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products,” buying into the very economic system which is destroying the earth, our communities, and all they represent.

Throughout the book Berry asks, What is appropriate? What is worth conserving from our past and preserving in our present? What is it to be human and truly connected to others? What does it mean to be free?

Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work (Blazer Lectures)

by Wendell Berry

By examining the life and work of celebrated painter, Harlan Hubbard, author Wendell Berry creates the perfect vehicle for emphasizing the themes of his other writings: the value of self-sufficiency, our responsibility to the environment, the holiness of everyday life, and the preference of simplicity over modern, mechanized life. Includes 20 color plates of Hubbard's own paintings, along with several photographs of Anna and Harlan Hubbard.

Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy

by Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall

"In 1973, James Baker Hall photographed these scenes and events of a Kentucky tobacco harvest. We look at them now with a sort of wonder, and with some regret, realizing that while our work was going on, powerful forces were at play that would change the scene and make "history" of those lived days, which were enriched for us then by their resemblance to earlier days and to days that presumably were to follow."―Wendell Berry, from the book

An insightful meditation on the shifting nature of humans' relationships with the land and with each other, Berry's essay laments the economic, political, and societal changes that have forever altered Kentucky's rich agricultural traditions. Berry also adds a deeply personal perspective to Hall's eloquent visual testimony.

With a farm of his own nearby, Berry was a longtime friend and neighbor of the families shown in Hall's pictures and took part in their work swapping. In addition to detailing the repetitive, strenuous labor involved in harvesting a tobacco crop, he relates memories of stories told, laughs shared, meals savored, and brief moments of rest and refreshment well earned.

Hall's striking photographs illuminate the characters and events that Berry describes. During the 1973 harvest, he photographed the rows stretching toward the horizon while laborers cut a tobacco crop, one plant at a time, until the last row was cut, hauled, and housed in the barn. These photographs powerfully convey the physical experiences of a Kentucky tobacco harvest: the heat of the sun, the dirt, and the people hard at work.

James Baker Hall, former Kentucky Poet Laureate, is the author of many books, including The Total Light Process and Yates Paul, His Grand Fights, His Tootings.

Wendell Berry is a poet, a novelist, a farmer, a conservationist, and a former professor of English. His books include The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Jayber Crow, Two More Stories of the Port William Membership, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition, and Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work.

Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy

by Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall

With his striking photographs, James Baker Hall powerfully conveys the physical experience of a Kentucky tobacco harvest. He captures the process from the tractor ride out to the field, where rows of tobacco stretch toward the horizon, to the careful, precise cutting of each individual plant, and finally, to hauling the crop away and housing it in the barn. Hall's snapshots of the "gathering of many hands" who come to help and the time-honored practices of the harvest capture the end of an era.

Hall's stunning work is accompanied by an essay from Wendell Berry, which provides an insightful meditation on the shifting nature of humans' relationships with the land and with each other. Berry laments the economic, political, and societal changes that have forever altered Kentucky's rich agricultural traditions. He adds a deeply personal perspective to Hall's eloquent visual testimony, sharing memories of stories told, laughs shared, meals savored, and brief moments of rest and refreshment well earned.

Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy is a candid portrait of a bygone way of life―a time before cheaper tobacco imported from abroad and a public awareness of the health risks associated with tobacco use nearly destroyed the industry in the United States. Berry's words and Hall's photographs offer an understanding of the high standards and perfectionism required to produce a good harvest, as well as a glimpse of the hot sun, the dirt, and the people hard at work.

The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982

by Wendell Berry

A longtime spokesman for conservation, common sense, and sustainable agriculture, Wendell Berry writes eloquently in several styles and methods. Among other literary forms, he is a poet of great clarity and sureness. His love of language and his care for its music are matched only by his fidelity to the subjects he has written of during his first twenty-five years of work: land and nature, the family and community, tradition as the groundwork for life and culture. His graceful elegies sit easily alongside lyrics of humor and biting satire. Husbandman and husband, philosopher and Mad Farmer, he writes of values that endure, of earthy truths and universal imagery. His vision is one of hope and memory, of determination and faithfulness. For this far-reaching yet portable volume, Berry has chosen nearly two hundred poems from his previous eight collections.

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture

by Wendell Berry

Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land―from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

by Wendell Berry

Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry’s caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. A progenitor of the slow food movement, Wendell Berry reminds us all to take the time to understand the basics of what we ingest. “Eating is an agriculture act,” he writes. Indeed, we are all players in the food economy. For the last five decades, Berry has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of that influence, Michael Pollan here offers an introduction to this wonderful collection that is essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat.
Drawn from over thirty years of work, this collection joins bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Pollan, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, as essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat. The essays address such concerns as: How does organic measure up against locally grown? What are the differences between small and large farms, and how does that affect what you put on your dinner table? What can you do to support sustainable agriculture?

Nathan Coulter: A Novel

by Wendell Berry

Nathan Coulter, Wendell Berry’s first book, was published in 1960 when he was twenty-seven. In his first novel, the author presents his readers with their first introduction to what would become Berry’s life’s work, chronicling through fiction a place where the inhabitants of Port William form what is more than community, but rather a “membership” in interrelatedness, a spiritual community, united by duty and bonds of affection for one another and for the land upon which they make their livelihood.
When young Nathan loses his grandfather, Berry guides readers through the process of Nathan's grief, endearing the reader to the simple humanity through which Nathan views the world. Echoing Berry's own strongly held beliefs, Nathan tells us that his grandfather's life "couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields." Berry has long been compared to Faulkner for his ability to erect entire communities in his fiction, and his heart and soul have always lived in Port William, Kentucky. In this eloquent novel about duty, community, and a sweeping love of the land, Berry gives readers a classic book that takes them to that storied place.

Home Economics: Fourteen Essays

by Wendell Berry

"Wherever we live, however we do so, we desperately need a prophet of responsibility; and although the days of the prophets seem past to many of us, Berry may be the closest to one we have. But, fortunately, he is also a poet of responsibility. He makes one believe that the good life may not only be harder than what we're used to but sweeter as well." ―The New York Review of Books

In Home Economics, Berry explores this process and continues to discuss what it means to make oneself “responsibly at home.” As he argues, a measure of the health of the planet is economics―the health of its households.

Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World

by Wendell Berry

Whitefoot is a mouse, a small creature with "elegant whiskers" and a "reddish brindly tan" coat. She lives at the edge of the woods, where she knows, without a doubt, that she exists at the center of the world. What she doesn’t know is that not far from her safe haven there is a river, and a world of such size and magnitude that she cannot even imagine it. One day, a burst of rain floods down on Whitefoot, lifting her in its currents and carrying her far from home. What happens next leads Whitefoot on a great adventure — one in which she must encounter new experiences and challenges to her survival. The discovery of the universe around her, and her ability to survive within it, is a lesson that’s sure to resonate with children and adults alike. Written by best-selling author, Wendell Berry, this beautiful volume is illustrated in fine detail with original drawings by acclaimed artist Davis Te Selle.

Remembering: A Novel

by Wendell Berry

A poetic novel of despair, hope, and the redemptive power of work deepens an award-winning author’s grand Port Williams literary project.
After losing his hand in an accident, Andy Catlett confronts an agronomist whose surreal vision can see only industrial farming. This vision is powerfully contrasted with that of modest Amish farmers content to live outside the pressures brought by capitalist postindustrial progress, and by working the land to keep away the three great evils of boredom, vice, and need.
As Andy’s perspective filters through his anger over his loss and the harsh city of San Francisco surrounding him, he begins to remember: the people and places that wait 2,000 miles away in his Kentucky home, the comfort he knew as a farmer, and his symbiotic relationship to the soil. Andy laments the modern shift away from the love of the land, even as he begins to accept his own changed relationship to the world. Wendell Berry’s continued fascination with the power of memory continues in this treasured novel set in 1976.
“[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” ―The Bloomsbury Review

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural

by Wendell Berry

The essays in The Gift of Good Land are as true today as when they were first published in 1981; the problems addressed here are still true and the solutions no nearer to hand. The insistent theme of this book is the interdependence, the wholeness, the oneness of people, land, weather, animals, and family. To touch one is to tamper with them all. We live in one functioning organism whose separate parts are artificially isolated by our culture. Here, Berry develops the compelling argument that the “gift” of good land has strings attached. We have it only on loan and only for as long as we practice good stewardship.

What Are People For?: Essays

by Wendell Berry

Ranging from America’s insatiable consumerism and household economies to literary subjects and America’s attitude toward waste, here Berry gracefully navigates from one topic to the next. He speaks candidly about the ills plaguing America and the growing gap between people and the land. Despite the somber nature of these essays, Berry’s voice and prose provide an underlying sense of faith and hope. He frames his reflections with poetic responsibility, standing up as a firm believer in the power of the human race not only to fix its past mistakes but to build a future that will provide a better life for all.

The Hidden Wound

by Wendell Berry

An impassioned, thoughtful, and fearless essay on the effects of racism on the American identity by one of our country’s most humane literary voices.
Acclaimed as “one of the most humane, honest, liberating works of our time” (The Village Voice), The Hidden Wound is a book-length essay about racism and the damage it has done to the identity of our country. Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains how remaining passive in the face of the struggle of racism further corrodes America’s great potential. In a quiet and observant manner, Berry opens up about how his attempt to discuss racism is rooted in the hope that someday the historical wound will begin to heal. Pulitzer prize-winning author Larry McMurtry calls this “a profound, passionate, crucial piece of writing . . . Few readers, and I think, no writers will be able to read it without a small pulse of triumph at the temples: the strange, almost communal sense of triumph one feels when someone has written truly well . . . The statement it makes is intricate and beautiful, sad but strong.”
“Mr. Berry is a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau.” ―The Baltimore Sun
"[Berry’s poems] shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life.” ―The Christian Science Monitor
“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” ―The Bloomsbury Review
“[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” ―Publishers Weekly

A World Lost: A Novel

by Wendell Berry

In this, Wendell Berry’s fifth novel and ninth work of fiction, Andy Catlett revisits his own ninth year in the summer of 1944 when his beloved uncle is shot and killed by the surly and mysterious Carp Harmon. This is his Uncle Andrew, after whom the boy is named, someone who savored “company, talk, some kind of to-do, something to laugh at.”
Years later, still possessed by the story, Andy seeks to get to the bottom of all this, to understand the two men and their lethal connection.
“Berry deftly balances Andy’s investigation into the town’s past with an equally moving realization not only of the sustaining value of memory but of the manner in which they are shaped in enduring ways by what they love . . . a sharp portrait of a town nursing its secrets over decades.” ―Kirkus Reviews

New Collected Poems

by Marianne Moore, Wendell Berry, Eavan Boland, George Oppen

Here, Wendell Berry revisits for the first time his immensely popular Collected Poems, which The New York Times Book Review described as “a straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament, and family life” and “[returns] American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.” In New Collected Poems, Berry reprints the nearly two hundred pieces in Collected Poems, along with the poems from his most recent collections―Entries, Given, and Leavings―to create an expanded collection, showcasing the work of a man heralded by The Baltimore Sun as “a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau . . . a major poet of our time.”
Wendell Berry is the author of over forty works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. While he began publishing work in the 1960s, Booklist has written that "Berry has become ever more prophetic," clearly standing up to the test of time.

New Collected Poems

by Marianne Moore, Wendell Berry, Eavan Boland, George Oppen

A landmark definitive edition of one of our most innovative and beloved poets

The landmark oeuvre of Marianne Moore, one of the major inventors of poetic modernism, has had no straight path from beginning to end; until now, there has been no good vantage point from which to see the body of her remarkable work as a whole. Throughout her life Moore arranged and rearranged, visited and revisited, a large majority of her existing poetry, always adding new work interspersed among revised poems. This makes sorting out the complex textual history that she left behind a pressing task if we mean to represent her work as a poet in a way that gives us a complete picture. New Collected Poems offers an answer to the question of how to represent the work of a poet so skillful and singular, giving a portrait of the range of her voice and of the modernist culture she helped create.

William Carlos Williams, remarking on the impeccable precision of Moore’s poems, praised “the aesthetic pleasure engendered when pure craftsmanship joins hard surfaces skillfully.” It is only in New Collected Poems that we can understand her later achievements, see how she refashioned her earlier work, and get a more complete understanding of her consummate craftsmanship, innovation, and attention to detail. Presented and collected by Heather Cass White, the foremost scholar of Moore’s work, this new collection at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of these dazzling poems as the author first envisioned them.

New Collected Poems

by Marianne Moore, Wendell Berry, Eavan Boland, George Oppen

A landmark definitive edition of one of our most innovative and beloved poets

The landmark oeuvre of Marianne Moore, one of the major inventors of poetic modernism, has had no straight path from beginning to end; until now, there has been no good vantage point from which to see the body of her remarkable work as a whole. Throughout her life Moore arranged and rearranged, visited and revisited, a large majority of her existing poetry, always adding new work interspersed among revised poems. This makes sorting out the complex textual history that she left behind a pressing task if we mean to represent her work as a poet in a way that gives us a complete picture. New Collected Poems offers an answer to the question of how to represent the work of a poet so skillful and singular, giving a portrait of the range of her voice and of the modernist culture she helped create.

William Carlos Williams, remarking on the impeccable precision of Moore’s poems, praised “the aesthetic pleasure engendered when pure craftsmanship joins hard surfaces skillfully.” It is only in New Collected Poems that we can understand her later achievements, see how she refashioned her earlier work, and get a more complete understanding of her consummate craftsmanship, innovation, and attention to detail. Presented and collected by Heather Cass White, the foremost scholar of Moore’s work, this new collection at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of these dazzling poems as the author first envisioned them.

New Collected Poems

by Marianne Moore, Wendell Berry, Eavan Boland, George Oppen

An expansive, celebratory collection from “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century” (Poetry Review).
An Origin Like Water: Poems 1967–1987 confirmed Eavan Boland’s place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems now brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding material from her subsequent volumes and filling out key poems from the early years. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Boland’s work traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement, and patient experimentation with form, theme, and language.

New Collected Poems

by Marianne Moore, Wendell Berry, Eavan Boland, George Oppen

An expansive, celebratory collection from “one of the finest and boldest poets of the last half century” (Poetry Review). An Origin Like Water: Poems 1967–1987 confirmed Eavan Boland’s place at the forefront of modern Irish poetry. New Collected Poems now brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding material from her subsequent volumes and filling out key poems from the early years. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Boland’s work traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement, and patient experimentation with form, theme, and language.

New Collected Poems

by Marianne Moore, Wendell Berry, Eavan Boland, George Oppen

“Michael Davidson has done a masterful job of editing this new edition of the Collected Poems.... Few poets significantly alter and enhance the state of the art. Oppen is one of them.”―Michael Palmer, Bookforum George Oppen’s New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poet’s books published in his lifetime (1908–84), as well as his previously uncollected poems and a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, whose writing was championed by Ezra Pound when it was first published by The Objectivist Press in the 1930s, has become one of America’s most admired poets. In 1969 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection Of Being Numerous, which The New Yorker recently said is “unmatched by any book of American poetry since.” The New Collected Poems is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction about the poet’s life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as keys to references in the poems. The award-winning essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger offers a personal remembrance of the poet in his preface, “Oppen Then.”

New Collected Poems

by Marianne Moore, Wendell Berry, Eavan Boland, George Oppen

Here, Wendell Berry revisits for the first time his immensely popular Collected Poems, which The New York Times Book Review described as “a straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament, and family life” and “[returns] American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.” In New Collected Poems, Berry reprints the nearly two hundred pieces in Collected Poems, along with the poems from his most recent collections―Entries, Given, and Leavings―to create an expanded collection, showcasing the work of a man heralded by The Baltimore Sun as “a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau . . . a major poet of our time.”
Wendell Berry is the author of over forty works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. While he began publishing work in the 1960s, Booklist has written that "Berry has become ever more prophetic," clearly standing up to the test of time.

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford

by Wendell Berry

A “superb study” that “reminds us that Williams remains our contemporary not only for the lively cadences and fresh imagery that animate his poems, but for the ethical imperative of his example” (The Sewanee Review).
Acclaimed essayist and poet Wendell Berry was born and has always lived in a provincial part of the country without an established literary culture. In an effort to adapt his poetry to his place of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry discovered an enduringly useful example in the work of William Carlos Williams. In Williams’ commitment to his place of Rutherford, New Jersey, Berry found an inspiration that inevitably influenced the direction of his own writing.
Both men would go on to establish themselves as respected American poets, and here Berry sets forth his understanding of that evolution for Williams, who in the course of his local membership and service, became a poet indispensable to us all.
“Generously quoting many of Williams’ best lines . . . Berry produces a work of aesthetics more than evaluation, of love more than critique.” ―Booklist

The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford

by Wendell Berry

"Generously quoting many of Williams' best lines, tenderly confessing when he doesn't understand Williams (e.g., Williams' elusive ‘variable foot’), and referring to his own life and work to clarify what he thinks about Williams, Berry produces a work of aesthetics more than evaluation, of love more than critique." ―Booklist

"Berry's superb study reminds us that Williams remains our contemporary not only for the lively cadences and fresh imagery that animate his poems, but for the ethical imperative of his example: to know ourselves as creatures of a particular place and, through that grounded knowledge, to develop the arts that will enable us to live in it over the long haul." ―The Sewanee Review

Acclaimed essayist and poet Wendell Berry was born and has always lived in a "provincial" part of the country without an established literary culture. In an effort to adapt his poetry to his place of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry discovered an enduringly useful example in the work of William Carlos Williams. In Williams' commitment to his place of Rutherford, New Jersey, Berry found an inspiration that inevitably influenced the direction of his own writing.
Both men would go on to establish themselves as respected American poets, and here Berry sets forth his understanding of that evolution for Williams, who in the course of his local membership and service, became a poet indispensable to us all.

Imagination in Place

by Wendell Berry

"Berry's latest collection of essays is the reminiscence of a literary life. It is a book that acknowledges a lifetime of intellectual influences, and in doing so, positions Berry more squarely as a cornerstone of American literature . . . A necessary book. Here, Berry's place as the 'grandfather of slow food' or the 'prophet of rural living' is not questioned. This book ensures we understand the depth and breadth of Berry's art." ―San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] stellar collection . . . Foodies, architects, transportation engineers, and other writers are adopting and adapting [Berry’s] concepts, perhaps leading to what he envisions will one day be 'an authentic settlement of our country.'" ―The Oregonian

In Imagination in Place, we travel to the local cultures of several writers important to Berry's life and work, from Wallace Stegner's great West and Ernest Gaines' Louisiana plantation life to Donald Hall's New England, and on to the Western frontier as seen through the Far East lens of Gary Snyder. Berry laments today's dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and literary sense.
Berry laments today's dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and literary sense. Rich with Berry's personal experience of life as a Kentucky agrarian, the collection includes portraits of a few of America's most imaginative writers, including James Still, Hayden Carruth, Jane Kenyon, John Haines, and several others.

Traveling at Home

by Wendell Berry

The fifteen poems and one essay included here, personally selected by Wendell Berry from among his previously published work, quietly and joyously celebrate the enduring satisfactions of good work and a happy home.

Traveling at Home opens with “A Walk Down Camp Branch,” an essay in which the author reveals his special sensitivity to nature and his rural Kentucky community. Next are poems from 1957 to 1982 in which Berry establishes his enduring themes—the contemplation of the individual’s place within community and the interdependence of all things. In conclusion is a group of the Sabbath poems in which the poet speaks with reverence and humility of the pains and joys of relationships with the land, with family, and with passing generations.

Originally published as a limited edition in 1988, Traveling at Home pairs Mr. Berry’s eloquent writings with John DePol’s exquisite woodcuts. It is one of the most beautiful presentations of this well-loved writer’s work.

Leavings: Poems

by Wendell Berry

“Berry has become ever more prophetic . . . In the Sabbaths of 2005–08 published here, Berry angrily mourns the degradation of the nation wrought by destruction of the land and the pursuit of wealth and power. He says that we must prepare to live without hope for a while, though in the very first of the Sabbaths, he prays not to lose love along with hope: ‘Help me, please, to carry / this candle against the wind.’ Despite anger and bitterness, he often recalls and teaches the beauty and propriety of creation, too. If he is a Jeremiah, he is also a David the psalmist.” ―Booklist
No one writes like Wendell Berry. Whether essay, novel, story, or poem, his inimitable voice rings true, as natural as the land he has farmed in Kentucky for over 40 years.
Following the widely praised Given, this new collection offers a masterful blend of epigrams, elegies, lyrics, and letters, with the occasional short love poem. Alternately amused, outraged, and resigned, Berry's welcome voice is the constant in this varied mix. The book concludes with a new sequence of Sabbath poems, works that have spawned from Berry's Sunday morning walks of meditation and observation.
Berry's themes are reflections of his life: friends, family, the farm, the nature around us as well as within. He speaks strongly for himself and sometimes for the lost heart of the country. As he has borne witness to the world for eight decades, what he offers us now in this collection of poems is of incomparable value.

Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

by Wendell Berry

"A Kentucky farmer and writer, and perhaps the great moral essayist of our day, Berry has produced one of his shortest but also most powerful volumes." ―The New York Review of Books

"The rarest (and highest) of literary classes consist of that small group of authors who are absolutely inimitable . . . One of the half-dozen living American authors who belongs in this class is Wendell Berry." ―Los Angeles Times

"Berry is a philosopher, poet, novelist, and an essayist in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau . . . like Thoreau, he marches to a different drummer, a drummer we would do well to be aware of, if not to march to." ―San Francisco Chronicle

From modern health care to the practice of forestry, from local focus to national resolve, Wendell Berry argues, there can never be a separation between global ecosystems and human communities―the two are intricately connected, and the health and survival of one depends upon the other.
Provocative, intimate, and thoughtful, Another Turn of the Crank reaches to the heart of Berry's concern and vision for the future, for America and for the world.

Farming: A Hand Book

by Wendell Berry

The sanity and eloquence of these poems spring from the land in Kentucky where Wendell Berry was born, married, lives, farms, and writes. From classic pastoral themes both lyrical and reflective, to a verse play, to a dramatic narrative and the manic, entertaining, prescient ravings of Berry’s Mad Farmer, these poems show a unity of language and consciousness, skill and sensitivity, that has placed Wendell Berry at the front rank of contemporary American poets.

What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

by Wendell Berry

"The reasoned and insistent exhortations of a man with a cause who, rather than mellowing with age and wisdom, continues to grow in forcefulness and vision." ―Booklist

Over the years, Wendell Berry has sought to understand and confront the financial structure of modern society and the impact of developing late capitalism on American culture. There is perhaps no more demanding or important critique available to contemporary citizens than Berry's writings ― just as there is no vocabulary more given to obfuscation than that of economics as practiced by professionals and academics. Berry has called upon us to return to the basics. He has traced how the clarity of our economic approach has eroded over time, as the financial asylum was overtaken by the inmates, and citizens were turned from consumers ― entertained and distracted ― to victims, threatened by a future of despair and disillusion.
For this collection, Berry offers essays from the last twenty-five years, alongside new essays about the recent economic collapse, including “Money Versus Goods” and “Faustian Economics,” treatises of great alarm and courage. He offers advice and perspective as our society attempts to steer from its present chaos and recession to a future of hope and opportunity. With urgency and clarity, Berry asks us to look toward a true sustainable commonwealth, grounded in realistic Jeffersonian principles applied to our present day.

Window Poems

by Wendell Berry

Composed while Wendell Berry looked out the multipaned window of his writing studio, this early sequence of poems contemplates Berry’s personal life as much as it ponders the seasons he witnessed through the window. First designed and printed on a Washington hand press by Bob Barris at the Press on Scroll Road, Window Poems includes elegant wood engravings by Wesley Bates that complement the reflective and meditative beauty of Berry’s poems.

Window Poems

by Wendell Berry

Composed while Wendell Berry looked out the multipaned window of his writing studio, this early sequence of poems contemplates Berry’s personal life as much as it ponders the seasons he witnessed through the window. First designed and printed on a Washington hand press by Bob Barris at the Press on Scroll Road, Window Poems includes elegant wood engravings by Wesley Bates that complement the reflective and meditative beauty of Berry’s poems.

Jayber Crow: A Novel

by Wendell Berry

“This is a book about Heaven,” says Jayber Crow, “but I must say too that . . . I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell.” It is 1932 and he has returned to his native Port William to become the town's barber.
Orphaned at age ten, Jayber Crow’s acquaintance with loneliness and want have made him a patient observer of the human animal, in both its goodness and frailty.
He began his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College. There, freedom met with new burdens and a young man needed more than a mirror to find himself. But the beginning of that finding was a short conversation with "Old Grit," his profound professor of New Testament Greek.
"You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out―perhaps a little at a time."
"And how long is that going to take?"
"I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps."
"That could be a long time."
"I will tell you a further mystery," he said. "It may take longer."
Wendell Berry’s clear-sighted depiction of humanity’s gifts―love and loss, joy and despair―is seen though his intimate knowledge of the Port William Membership.

A Place on Earth

by Wendell Berry

Published in 1967, we return to Port William during the Second World War to revisit Jayber Crow, the barber, Uncle Stanley, the gravedigger, Jarrat and Burley, the sharecroppers, and Brother Preston, the preacher, as well as Mat Feltner, his wife Margaret, and his daughter-in-law Hannah, whose son will be born after news comes that Hannah’s husband Virgil is missing.
"The earth is the genius of our life,” Wendell Berry writes here. “The final questions and their answers lie serenely coupled in it."

Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

by Wendell Berry

“[A] scathing assessment . . . Berry shows that Wilson's much-celebrated, controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion, art, and everything else that is good to science . . . Berry is one of the most perceptive critics of American society writing today.” ―The Washington Post

“I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than Wilson himself . . . A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific materialism.” ―The Christian Science Monitor

In Life Is a Miracle, the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix we are left at sea in the world.

Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

by Wendell Berry

Disputes the assertations of E.O. Wilson's Consilience, claiming that religion and art are not subject to modern science.

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry gathers one hundred poems written between 1957 and 1996. Chosen by the author, these pieces have been selected from each of nine previously published collections. The rich work in this volume reflects the development of Berry’s poetic sensibility over four decades. Focusing on themes that have occupied his work for years―land and nature, family and community, tradition as the groundwork for life and culture―The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry celebrates the broad range of this vital and transforming poet.

The Memory of Old Jack

by Wendell Berry

Old Jack, born just after the American Civil War and dying in contemporary times, spends one beautiful September day in Port William, his home since birth, remembering.
The story tells of the most searing moments of Old Jack’s life, particularly his debt to his sister Nancy and her husband Ben Feltner, Old Jack’s model of what an honorable manhood and strength might be.
"Few novelists treat both their characters and their readers with the kind of respect that Wendell Berry displays in this deeply moving account . . . The Memory of Old Jack is a slab of rich Americana." ―The New York Times Book Review

A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

by Wendell Berry

Berry’s Sabbath Poems embrace much that is elemental to human life―beauty, death, peace, and hope. In his preface, Berry writes about the growing audience for public poetry readings. While he sees poetry in the public eye as a good thing, Berry asks us to recognize the private life of the poem. These Sabbath Poems were written "in silence, in solitude, and mainly out of doors," and tell us about "moments when heart and mind are open and aware."
Wendell Berry is beloved for his quiet, steady explorations of nature, his emphasis on finding good work to do in the world, and his faith in the solace of family, memory, and community. His poetry is assured and unceasingly spiritual; its power lies in the strength of the truths revealed.

Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories: The Civil War to World War II (LOA #302): Nathan Coulter / Andy Catlett: Early Travels / A World Lost / ... (Library of America Wendell Berry Edition)

by Wendell Berry

Library of America inaugurates its edition of the complete fiction of one of America's most beloved living writers

For more than fifty years, in eight novels and fortytwo short stories, Wendell Berry (b. 1934) has created an indelible portrait of rural America through the lens of Port William, Kentucky, one of the most fully imagined places in American literature. Taken together, these novels and stories form a masterwork of American prose: straightforward, spare, and lyrical. Now, for the first time, in an edition prepared in consultation with the author, Library of America is presenting the complete story of Port William in the order of narrative chronology. This first volume, which spans from the Civil War to World War II, gathers the novels Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 1985), A Place on Earth (1967, revised 1983), A World Lost (1996), and Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006), along with twenty-three short stories, among them such favorites as “Watch With Me,” “Thicker than Liquor,” and “A Desirable Woman.” It also features a newly researched chronology of Berry’s life and career, a map and a Port William Membership family tree, and helpful notes.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Wendell Berry: Essays 1969-1990 (LOA #316) (Library of America Wendell Berry Edition)

by Wendell Berry

The first volume of the Library of America's definitive two-volume selection of the nonfiction writings of our greatest living advocate for sustainable culture.

Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism, and the vital role of rural, sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Now, in celebration of Berry's extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume selection of his nonfiction writings prepared in close consultation with the author.

This first volume collects thirty-three essays from nine different books, including his first, The Long-Legged House (1969), What are People For? (1990), with its still provocative essay "Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer," and the complete text of his now classic The Unsettling of America (1975), whose argument about the enormous ecological, economic, and human costs of industrial agriculture has, as the author notes, "not had the happy fate of being proved wrong."

Berry's essays remain timely, even urgent today, and will resonate with anyone interested in our relationship to the natural world and especially with a younger, politically engaged generation invested in the future welfare of the planet.

INCLUDES:

The Unsettling of America

AND SELECTIONS FROM

The Long-Legged House
The Hidden Wound
A Continuous Harmony
Recollected Essays
The Gift of Good Land
Standing by Words
Home Economics
What Are People For?

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Wendell Berry: Essays 1993-2017 (LOA #317) (Library of America Wendell Berry Edition)

by Wendell Berry

The second volume of the Library of America's definitive two-volume selection of the nonfiction writings of our greatest living advocate for sustainable culture.

Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism, and the vital role of rural, sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Now, in celebration of Berry's extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume selection of his nonfiction writings prepared in close consultation with the author.

In this second volume, forty-four essays from ten works turn to issues of political and social debate--big government, science and religion, and the meaning of citizenship following the tragedy of 9/11. Also included is his Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities, "It All Turns on Affection" (2012). Berry's essays remain timely, even urgent today, and will resonate with anyone interested in our relationship to the natural world and especially with a younger, politically engaged generation invested in the future welfare of the planet.

INCLUDES:

Life is a Miracle

AND SELECTIONS FROM

Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
Another Turn of the Crank
Citizenship Papers
The Way of Ignorance
What Matters?
Imagination in Place
It All Turns on Affection
Our Only World
The Art of Loading Brush

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories: The Postwar Years (LOA #381) (Library of America, 381)

by Wendell Berry

Library of America continues its definitive edition of Wendell Berry's complete fiction, including the novels The Memory of Old Jack and Remembering and 23 brilliant and beautiful stories

In this second volume, Port William faces the disappearance of farms and farmers in the decades after World War II, while Andy Catlett resolves to remain in the Membership

Set along the banks of the Kentucky River in America’s heartland, fictional Port William, Kentucky, is an agrarian world is peopled with memorable and beloved characters collectively known as the Port William Membership. For more than 50 years, Wendell Berry has told Port William’s history from the Civil War to the present day, recapturing a time when farming, faith, and family were the anchors of community and the ligaments that bound one generation to the next.

Now Library of America continues its definitive edition, prepared in close consultation with the author and published for his 90th birthday, presenting the complete story of Port William for the first time in the order of narrative chronology.

This second volume contains 23 stories and 2 novels that span the years 1945 to 1978, as the town faces the forces of mechanization and the looming possibility of its own disappearance. As the generation that came of age after the Civil War disappears, the younger generation increasingly chooses to leave and not return; one of the only exceptions is Andy Catlett, who resolves to remain in and to maintain the Membership.

This definitive edition of Wendell Berry's complete fiction includes detailed notes, endpapers featuring a map of Port William and a Membership family tree, and a chronology of Berry's remarkable life and career.

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

"Here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness. We would do well to hear him." ―The Washington Post Book World

The Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes―an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geobiography―these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture.
Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the forces of social disintegration and how might they be reversed? How might men and women live together in ways that benefit both? And, how does the corporate takeover of social institutions and economic practices contribute to the destruction of human and natural environments?
Through his staunch support of local economies, his defense of farming communities, and his call for family integrity, Berry emerges as the champion of responsibilities and priorities that serve the health, vitality and happiness of the whole community of creation.

The Long-Legged House

by Wendell Berry

First published in 1969 and out of print for more than twenty-five years, The Long-Legged House was Wendell Berry's first collection of essays, the inaugural work introducing many of the central issues that have occupied him over the course of his career. Three essays at the heart of this volume―“The Rise,” “The Long-Legged House,” and “A Native Hill”―are essays of homecoming and memoir, as the writer finds his home place, his native ground, his place on earth. As he later wrote, “What I stand for is what I stand on,” and here we see him beginning the acts of rediscovery and resettling.

The Long-Legged House

by Wendell Berry

First published in 1969 and out of print for more than twenty-five years, The Long-Legged House was Wendell Berry's first collection of essays, the inaugural work introducing many of the central issues that have occupied him over the course of his career. Three essays at the heart of this volume―“The Rise,” “The Long-Legged House,” and “A Native Hill”―are essays of homecoming and memoir, as the writer finds his home place, his native ground, his place on earth. As he later wrote, “What I stand for is what I stand on,” and here we see him beginning the acts of rediscovery and resettling.

The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge

by Wendell Berry

Only someone who values land enough to farm a hillside for more than thirty years could write about a wild place so lovingly. Wendell Berry just as easily steps into Kentucky’s Red River Gorge and makes the observations of a poet as he does step away to view his subject with the keen, unflinching eye of an essayist. The inimitable voice of Wendell Berry—at once frank and lovely—is our guide as we explore this unique wilderness.

Located in eastern Kentucky and home to 26,000 acres of untamed river, rock formations, historical sites, unusual vegetation and wildlife, the Gorge very nearly fell victim to a man-made lake thirty years ago. “No place is to be learned like a textbook,” Berry tells us, and so through revealing the Gorge’s corners and crevices, its ridges and rapids, his words not only implore us to know more but to venture there ourselves. Infused with his very personal perspective and enhanced by the startling photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, The Unforeseen Wilderness draws the reader in to celebrate an extraordinary natural beauty and to better understand what threatens it.

The Mad Farmer Poems

by Wendell Berry

During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he's found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings―these are often funny in spite of themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as he is regrettable.
Here are gathered the individual poems from Berry's various collections to offer the teachings of this amazing American voice. After the great success of the lovely Window Poems, Bob Baris of the Press on Scroll Road returns to design and produce an edition illustrated with etchings by Abigail Rover. James Baker Hall and William Kloefkorn offer poems here that also show how the Mad Farmer has escaped into the work of others. The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of anger and humor to bring even the most terrible consequences into a focus otherwise impossible to obtain.

The Mad Farmer Poems

by Wendell Berry

About the Author Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky. Product Description During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he's found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings―these are often funny in spite of themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as he is regrettable.Here are gathered the individual poems from Berry's various collections to offer the teachings of this amazing American voice. After the great success of the lovely Window Poems, Bob Baris of the Press on Scroll Road returns to design and produce an edition illustrated with etchings by Abigail Rover. James Baker Hall and William Kloefkorn offer poems here that also show how the Mad Farmer has escaped into the work of others. The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of anger and humor to bring even the most terrible consequences into a focus otherwise impossible to obtain. Review Praise for Wendell Berry"Berry enjoins us to look at common parts of creation––trees, rivers, and birds––but meditates upon them with such grace and insight as to ensure that we will never see them as commonplace again."—Splendid Magazine"Berry continues to offer a compelling vision of the good and the true life."—Boston Globe"Berry is the prophetic American voice of our day."—Christian Science Monitor"Berry's craftsmanship remains impeccable."—Booklist

The Mad Farmer Poems

by Wendell Berry

During the otherwise quiet course of his life as a poet, Wendell Berry has become “mad” at what contemporary society has made of its land, its communities, and its past. This anger reaches its peak in the poems of the Mad Farmer, an open-ended sequence he's found himself impelled to continue against his better instincts. These poems can take the shape of manifestos, meditations, insults, Whitmanic fits and ravings―these are often funny in spite of themselves. The Mad Farmer is a character as necessary, perhaps, as he is regrettable.
Here are gathered the individual poems from Berry's various collections to offer the teachings of this amazing American voice. After the great success of the lovely Window Poems, Bob Baris of the Press on Scroll Road returns to design and produce an edition illustrated with etchings by Abigail Rover. James Baker Hall and William Kloefkorn offer poems here that also show how the Mad Farmer has escaped into the work of others. The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of anger and humor to bring even the most terrible consequences into a focus otherwise impossible to obtain.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels

by Wendell Berry

A young boy takes a trip on his own to visit his grandparents in Kentucky in this luminous entry in the acclaimed Port William series.
In this “eloquent distillation of Berry’s favorite themes: the importance of family, community and respect for the land” (Kirkus Reviews), nine-year-old Andy Catlett embarks on a solo trip by bus to visit his grandparents in Port William, Kentucky, during the Christmas of 1943. Full of “nostalgic, admiring detail” (Publishers Weekly), Andy observes the modern world crowding out the old ways, and the people he encounters become touchstones for his understanding of a precious and imperiled world. This beautiful, short memoir-like novel is a perfect introduction to Wendell Berry’s rich and ever-evolving saga of the Port William Membership, filled with images “as though describing a painting by Edward Hopper” (New York Times).

A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural

by Wendell Berry

A collection of essays on agrarian living from the poet and author hailed as “America’s greatest philosopher on sustainable life” (The Chicago Tribune).
In A Continuous Harmony, renowned poet, farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry makes an impassioned case for returning to a way of life Americans once lived on small family farms. The book’s title is taken from an account by the American mountaineer Thomas F. Hornbein on his travels in the Himalayas. “It seemed to me,” Horenbein wrote, “that here man lived in continuous harmony with the land, as much as briefly a part of it as all its other occupants.”
Wendell Berry’s second collection of essays, A Continuous Harmony includes the seminal “Think Little,” which appeared in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue, and beautifully advocates for small actions that can lead to profound change. The collection’s centerpiece, “Discipline and Hope,” is an insightful and articulate essay advocating for what he calls “a new middle.” Taken together, this collection offers “a dignified and lucid statement of the need for present attention―love―for the land” (The Boston Phoenix).

Citizenship Papers: Essays

by Wendell Berry

"The courage of a book, it has been said, is that it looks away from nothing. Here is a brave book." ―The Charlotte Observer

"Berry says that these recent essays mostly say again what he has said before. His faithful readers may think he hasn't, however, said any of it better before." ―Booklist (starred review)

"His refusal to abandon the local for the global, to sacrifice neighborliness, community integrity, and economic diversity for access to Wal-Mart, has never seemed more appealing, nor his questions of personal accountability more powerful." ―Kirkus Reviews

There are those in America today who seem to feel we must audition for our citizenship, with "patriot" offered as the badge for those found narrowly worthy. Let this book stand as Wendell Berry's application, for he is one of those faithful, devoted critics envisioned by the Founding Fathers to be the life's blood and very future of the nation they imagined. Citizenship Papers collects nineteen new essays, from celebrations of exemplary lives to critiques of American life, including "A Citizen's Response [to the new National Security Strategy]"―a ringing call of caution to a nation standing on the brink of global catastrophe.

Our Only World: Ten Essays

by Wendell Berry

"Stern but compassionate, author Wendell Berry raises broader issues that environmentalists rarely focus on . . . In one sense Berry is the voice of a rural agrarian tradition that stretches from rural Kentucky back to the origins of human civilization. But his insights are universal because Our Only World is filled with beautiful, compassionate writing and careful, profound thinking."
―Associated Press
The planet's environmental problems respect no national boundaries. From soil erosion and population displacement to climate change and failed energy policies, American governing classes are paid by corporations to pretend that debate is the only democratic necessity and that solutions are capable of withstanding endless delay. Late Capitalism goes about its business of finishing off the planet. And we citizens are left with a shell of what was once proudly described as The American Dream.
In this collection of eleven essays, Berry confronts head-on the necessity of clear thinking and direct action. Never one to ignore the present challenge, he understands that only clearly stated questions support the understanding their answers require. For more than fifty years we've had no better spokesman and no more eloquent advocate for the planet, for our families, and for the future of our children and ourselves.

Our Only World: Ten Essays

by Wendell Berry

"Stern but compassionate, author Wendell Berry raises broader issues that environmentalists rarely focus on . . . In one sense Berry is the voice of a rural agrarian tradition that stretches from rural Kentucky back to the origins of human civilization. But his insights are universal because Our Only World is filled with beautiful, compassionate writing and careful, profound thinking."
―Associated Press
The planet's environmental problems respect no national boundaries. From soil erosion and population displacement to climate change and failed energy policies, American governing classes are paid by corporations to pretend that debate is the only democratic necessity and that solutions are capable of withstanding endless delay. Late Capitalism goes about its business of finishing off the planet. And we citizens are left with a shell of what was once proudly described as The American Dream.
In this collection of eleven essays, Berry confronts head-on the necessity of clear thinking and direct action. Never one to ignore the present challenge, he understands that only clearly stated questions support the understanding their answers require. For more than fifty years we've had no better spokesman and no more eloquent advocate for the planet, for our families, and for the future of our children and ourselves.

A Country of Marriage: Poems

by Wendell Berry

The fifth volume of poetry―including three poems about the Mad Farmer―from the celebrated “beautiful, accessible poet [of] maverick conscience” (Kirkus Reviews).
First published in 1971, The Country of Marriage is Wendell Berry’s fifth volume of poetry. What he calls “an expansive metaphor” is “a farmer’s relationship to his land as the basic and central relation of humanity to creation . . . Similarly, marriage is the basic and central community tie . . . And these relationships are in turn basic to, and may stand for, our relationship to God and to the sustaining mysteries and powers of creation.”
Each of the thirty-five poems in this collection is concerned with the expansive themes contained in this metaphor. Most notably, there are more poems about the Mad Farmer, who advises us here to “every day do something that won’t compute.”
In The Country of Marriage, Berry has crafted a work that is immediately accessible but that becomes, as we read it again, always more satisfying, reverberant with manifold meanings.
Berry has here perfected a work that is immediately accessible but that becomes, as we read it again, always more satisfying, reverberant with manifold meanings.

It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays

by Wendell Berry

An impassioned and rigorous appeal for reconnection to the land and human feeling by one of America’s most heartfelt and humble writers.
When he accepted the invitation to deliver The Jefferson Lecture―our nation’s highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement―Wendell Berry decided to take on the obligation of thinking again about the problems that have engaged him throughout his long career. He wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair and healing even in these times of Late Capitalism and its destructive contagions. As a poet and writer he understood already that much can be gleaned from looking at the vocabulary of these problems themselves and how we describe them. And he settled on “affection” as a method of engagement and solution. The result is the greatest speech he has delivered in his six decades of public life. It All Turns on Affection will take its place alongside The Unsettling of America and The Gift of Good Land as major testaments to the power and clarity of his contribution to American thought.
Also included are a small handful of other recent essays and a wonderful conversation between Mr. Berry, his wife Tanya Berry, and the head of the National Endowment of the Humanities Jim Leech, which took place just after the award was announced. The result offers a wonderful continuation of the long conversation Berry has had with his readers over many years and as well as a fine introduction to his life and work.
“These powerful, challenging essays show why Berry’s vision of a sustainable, human-scaled society has proven so influential.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” ―The Bloomsbury Review

Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry

"The letters are valuable for ecologists, students, and teachers of contemporary American literature and for those of us eager to know how these two distant neighbors networked, negotiated, and remained friends." ―San Francisco Chronicle

"In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open-hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever-deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age." ―Orion Magazine

In 1969 Gary Snyder returned from a long residence in Japan to northern California, to a homestead in the Sierra foothills where he intended to build a house and settle on the land with his wife and young sons. He had just published his first book of essays, Earth House Hold. A few years before, after a long absence, Wendell Berry left New York City to return to land near his grandfather's farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and lived there with his wife as they restored an old house on their newly acquired homestead. In 1969 Berry had just published Long-Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture and of the new environmental movement had yet to meet, but they knew each other's work, and soon they began a correspondence. Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on American political and literary culture, nor could they have appreciated the impact they would have on one another.
Snyder had thrown over all vestiges of Christianity in favor of becoming a devoted Buddhist and Zen practitioner, and had lived in Japan for a prolonged period to develop this practice. Berry's discomfort with the Christianity of his native land caused him to become something of a renegade Christian, troubled by the church and organized religion, but grounded in its vocabulary and its narrative. Religion and spirituality seemed like a natural topic for the two men to discuss, and discuss they did. They exchanged more than 240 letters from 1973 to 2013, remarkable letters of insight and argument. The two bring out the best in each other, as they grapple with issues of faith and reason, discuss ideas of home and family, worry over the disintegration of community and commonwealth, and share the details of the lives they've chosen to live with their wives and children. Contemporary American culture is the landscape they reside on. Environmentalism, sustainability, global politics and American involvement, literature, poetry and progressive ideals, these two public intellectuals address issues as broad as are found in any exchange in literature.
No one can be unaffected by the complexity of their relationship, the subtlety of their arguments, and the grace of their friendship. This is a book for the ages.

This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials. With the publication of this new complete edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s work. And these magnificent poems, taken as a whole for the first time in This Day, have become one of the greatest contributions ever made to American poetry.

This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials. With the publication of this new complete edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s work. And these magnificent poems, taken as a whole for the first time in This Day, have become one of the greatest contributions ever made to American poetry.

Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder

by Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry

"The letters are valuable for ecologists, students, and teachers of contemporary American literature and for those of us eager to know how these two distant neighbors networked, negotiated, and remained friends." ―San Francisco Chronicle

"In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open-hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever-deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age." ―Orion Magazine

In 1969 Gary Snyder returned from a long residence in Japan to northern California, to a homestead in the Sierra foothills where he intended to build a house and settle on the land with his wife and young sons. He had just published his first book of essays, Earth House Hold. A few years before, after a long absence, Wendell Berry left New York City to return to land near his grandfather's farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and lived there with his wife as they restored an old house on their newly acquired homestead. In 1969 Berry had just published Long-Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture and of the new environmental movement had yet to meet, but they knew each other's work, and soon they began a correspondence. Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on American political and literary culture, nor could they have appreciated the impact they would have on one another.
Snyder had thrown over all vestiges of Christianity in favor of becoming a devoted Buddhist and Zen practitioner, and had lived in Japan for a prolonged period to develop this practice. Berry's discomfort with the Christianity of his native land caused him to become something of a renegade Christian, troubled by the church and organized religion, but grounded in its vocabulary and its narrative. Religion and spirituality seemed like a natural topic for the two men to discuss, and discuss they did. They exchanged more than 240 letters from 1973 to 2013, remarkable letters of insight and argument. The two bring out the best in each other, as they grapple with issues of faith and reason, discuss ideas of home and family, worry over the disintegration of community and commonwealth, and share the details of the lives they've chosen to live with their wives and children. Contemporary American culture is the landscape they reside on. Environmentalism, sustainability, global politics and American involvement, literature, poetry and progressive ideals, these two public intellectuals address issues as broad as are found in any exchange in literature.
No one can be unaffected by the complexity of their relationship, the subtlety of their arguments, and the grace of their friendship. This is a book for the ages.

A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership

by Wendell Berry

The story of the community of Port William is one of the great works in American literature. This collection, the tenth volume in the series, is the perfect occasion to celebrate Berry’s huge achievement. It feels as if the entire membership―all the Catletts, Burley Coulter, Elton Penn, the Rowanberrys, Laura Milby, the preacher’s wife, Kate Helen Branch, Andy’s dog, Mike―nearly everyone returns with a story or two, to fill in the gaps in this long tale. Those just now joining the Membership will be charmed. Those who’ve attended before will be enriched.
For more than fifty years, Wendell Berry has been telling us stories about Port William, a mythical town on the banks of the Kentucky River, populated over the years by a cast of unforgettable characters living in a single place over a long time. In A Place in Time, the stories dates range from 1864, when Rebecca Dawe finds herself in her own reflection at the end of the Civil War, to one from 1991 when Grover Gibbs' widow, Beulah, attends the auction as her home place is offered for sale.
"And so it's all gone. A new time has come. Various ones of the old time keep faith and stop by to see me, Coulter and Wilma and a few others. But the one I wait to see is Althie. Seems like my whole life now is lived under the feeling of her hand touching me that day of the sale, and every day still.
I lie awake in the night, and I can see it all in my mind, the old place, the house, all the things I took care of so long. I thought I might miss it, but I don't. The time has gone when I could do more than worry about it, and I declare it's a load off my mind. But the thoughts, still, are a kind of company."
― Beulah Gibbs

Terrapin: Poems by Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

Tom Pohrt spent years gathering poems by Wendell Berry that he thought children might read and appreciate, making sketches to accompany his selection. Terrapin is the result, a volume of twenty-one poems with dozens of sketches, drawings, and watercolors. In full color, we have not only a volume of staggering beauty but a consummate example of the collaborative effort that is fine bookmaking; the perfect gift for children, grandchildren, or anyone who remains a lover of the book as physical object.

Terrapin: Poems by Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

Tom Pohrt spent years gathering those poems of Wendell Berry’s he imagined children might read and appreciate, making sketches to accompany his selection. Over the past several years a dialogue has evolved in which the poet has come to advise the illustrator on the natural history of the animals and plants seen so intimately in the poems. Then came the august book designer Dave Bullen, who has been designing the books of Wendell Berry for more than thirty years.
The resulting volume of 21 poems includes dozens of the sketches, drawings and watercolors in what amounts to a visual meditation on the poem they work to illustrate and is simply staggering in both its beauty and its meaning to those of us who remain lovers of the book as physical object.

In the full-color Terrapin we have not only a volume of staggering beauty but a consummate example of the collaborative effort that is fine bookmaking, the perfect gift for children, grandchildren or anyone who remains a lover of the book as physical object.

Watch With Me: and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch

by Wendell Berry

This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that―with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers―here approaches the Shakespearean.
Tol Proudfoot is huge, outsized, in the tradition of the mythic. The three-hundred-pound farmer, personally imposing and unkempt, is also the most graceful of presences, reserved and gallant toward his tiny wife, the ninety-pound schoolteacher.
Their contrasts are humorous, of course, and recall the tall tales of rural Americana. In the novella Watch with Me, we are given a story of such depth, breadth, and importance it earns being listed as one of the most important short stories written in the American language during the twentieth century.
"Wendell Berry writes with a good husbandman’s care and economy . . . His stories are filled with gentle humor." ―The New York Times Book Review

"Berry is the master of earthy country living seen through the eyes of laconic farmers . . . He makes his stories shine with meaning and warmth." ―The Christian Science Monitor

"A small treasure of a book . . . part of a long line that descends from Chaucer to Katherine Mansfield to William Trevor." ―Chicago Tribune

A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015

by Wendell Berry

“Thoreau would be gratified . . . Here are Sabbath Poems that praise the given life.” ―Lexington Herald-Leader

“[Berry’s poems] shine with a gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life.” ―The Christian Science Monitor

“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life, be they those of composing a poem, preparing a hill for planting, raising a family, working for the good of oneself and one’s neighbors, loving.” ―The Bloomsbury Review

More than thirty-five years ago, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, when the weather allowed, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks sometimes yielded poems. Each year since, he has completed a series of these poems dated by the year of its composition.
This new sequence provides a virtual syllabus for all of Berry's cultural and agricultural work in concentrated form. Many of these poems, including a sequence at mid-year of 2014, were written on a small porch in the woods, a place of stillness and reflection, a vantage point "of the one / life of the forest composed / of uncountable lives in countless / years, each life coherent itself within / the coherence, the great composure, of all."
Recently Berry has been reflecting on more than a half century of reading, to discover and to delight in the poetical, spiritual, and cultural roots of his work. In The Presence of Nature in the Natural World, Berry's survey begins with Alan of Lille's twelfth-century work, The Plaint of Nature. From the Bible through Chaucer, from Milton to Pope, from Wordsworth to the moderns, Berry's close reading is exhilarating. Moving from the canon of poetry to the sayings and texts found in agricultutre and science, closely presented, we gain new appreciation for the complexity of the issues faced in the twenty-first century by the struggling community of humans on earth.
With this long essay appended to these new Sabbath Poems, the result is an unusual book of depth and engagement. A new collection of Wendall Berry poems is always an occasion for celebration, and this eccentric gatheirng is especially so.

A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015

by Wendell Berry

“Thoreau would be gratified . . . Here are Sabbath Poems that praise the given life.” ―Lexington Herald-Leader

“[Berry’s poems] shine with a gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life.” ―The Christian Science Monitor

“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life, be they those of composing a poem, preparing a hill for planting, raising a family, working for the good of oneself and one’s neighbors, loving.” ―The Bloomsbury Review

More than thirty-five years ago, Wendell Berry began spending his sabbaths outdoors, when the weather allowed, walking and wandering around familiar territory, seeking a deep intimacy only time could provide. These walks sometimes yielded poems. Each year since, he has completed a series of these poems dated by the year of its composition.
This new sequence provides a virtual syllabus for all of Berry's cultural and agricultural work in concentrated form. Many of these poems, including a sequence at mid-year of 2014, were written on a small porch in the woods, a place of stillness and reflection, a vantage point "of the one / life of the forest composed / of uncountable lives in countless / years, each life coherent itself within / the coherence, the great composure, of all."
Recently Berry has been reflecting on more than a half century of reading, to discover and to delight in the poetical, spiritual, and cultural roots of his work. In The Presence of Nature in the Natural World, Berry's survey begins with Alan of Lille's twelfth-century work, The Plaint of Nature. From the Bible through Chaucer, from Milton to Pope, from Wordsworth to the moderns, Berry's close reading is exhilarating. Moving from the canon of poetry to the sayings and texts found in agricultutre and science, closely presented, we gain new appreciation for the complexity of the issues faced in the twenty-first century by the struggling community of humans on earth.
With this long essay appended to these new Sabbath Poems, the result is an unusual book of depth and engagement. A new collection of Wendall Berry poems is always an occasion for celebration, and this eccentric gatheirng is especially so.

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

by Wendell Berry

Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land―from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.

Roots to the Earth: Poems and a Story

by Wendell Berry, Wesley Bates

In 1995, Wendell Berry’s Roots to the Earth was published in portfolio form by West Meadow Press. The wood etchings of celebrated artist and wood engraver, Wesley Bates, were printed from the original wood blocks on handmade Japanese paper. In 2014, this work was reprinted at Larkspur Press, along with additional poems. It is now with great pleasure that Counterpoint reproduces this collaborative work for trade publication, as well as expanding it with the inclusion of a short story, “The Branch Way of Doing,” and additional engravings by Bates.
In his introduction to the 2014 collection, Bates wrote: "As our society moves toward urbanization, the majority of the population views agriculture from an increasingly detached position. . . In his poetry [Berry] reveals tenderness and love as well as anger and uncertainty. . . The wood engravings in this collection are intended to be companion pieces to. . . the way he expresses what it is to be a farmer."

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

"Mr. Berry's sentences and stories deliver a great payload of edifying entertainment, which I hungrily consume, but it is the bass note of morality thumping through his musical phrases that guides me with the most constant of hands upon my plow." ―Nick Offerman, New York Times bestselling author of Paddle Your Own Canoe
"Read [Berry] with pencil in hand, make notes, and hope that somehow our country and the world will soon come to see the truth that is told here." ―The New York Times
"He is unlike anybody else writing today." ―New Statesman
In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his fifty-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities
The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.
With grace and conviction, Wendell Berry shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy―the natural world will not survive it.
Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

Now available in paperback, the most comprehensive―and only author-authorized―Wendell Berry reader.

"America's greatest philosopher on sustainable life and living." ―Chicago Tribune

In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his fifty-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities.

The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.

With grace and conviction, Wendell Berry shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy―the natural world will not allow it.

Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

Think Little: Essays

by Wendell Berry

First published in 1972, “Think Little” is cultural critic and agrarian Wendell Berry at his best: prescient about the dire environmental consequences of our mentality of greed and exploitation, yet hopeful that we will recognize war and oppression and pollution not as separate issues, but aspects of the same. “Think Little” is presented here alongside one of Berry’s most popular and personal essays, “A Native Hill.” This gentle essay of recollection is told alongside a poetic lesson in geography, as Berry explains at length and in detail, that what he stands for is what he stands on. Each palm-size book in the Counterpoints series is meant to stay with you, whether safely in your pocket or long after you turn the last page. From short stories to essays to poems, these little books celebrate our most-beloved writers, whose work encapsulates the spirit of Counterpoint Press: cutting-edge, wide-ranging, and independent.

Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community: Eight Essays

by Wendell Berry

"Read [him] with pencil in hand, make notes, and hope that somehow our country and the world will soon come to see the truth that is told here." ―The New York Times Book Review

In this collection of essays, first published in 1993, Wendell Berry continues his work as one of America's most necessary social commentators. With wisdom and clear, ringing prose, he tackles head-on some of the most difficult problems confronting us near the end of the twentieth century––problems we still face today.

Berry elucidates connections between sexual brutality and economic brutality, and the role of art and free speech. He forcefully addresses America's unabashed pursuit of self-liberation, which he says is "still the strongest force now operating in our society." As individuals turn away from their community, they conform to a "rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products," buying into the very economic system that is destroying the earth, our communities, and all they represent.

The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

by Wendell Berry

"Berry is a superb writer. His sense of what makes characters tick is extraordinary . . . Short stories don't get any better than these." ―People

As part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry comes this reissue of his 1986 classic, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership. Those stories include "Thicker Than Liquor", "Where Did They Go?", "It Wasn't Me", "The Boundary", "That Distant Land", and the titular "The Wild Birds."

Spanning more than three decades, from 1930 to 1967, these wonderful stories follow Wheeler Catlett, and reintroduce readers to the beloved people who live in Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky.

The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

by Wendell Berry

"The Art of Loading Brush is singular in Berry's corpus." ―The Paris Review

Wendell Berry's profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of agrarian philosophy. The Art of Loading Brush is an energetic mix of essays, stories, and a poem, which explore agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.

Fidelity: Five Stories

by Wendell Berry

"Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world." ―New York Times Book Review

Reissued as part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return readers to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight-knit community within.

"Each of these elegant stories spans the twentieth century and reveals the profound interconnectedness of the farmers and their families to one another, to their past and to the landscape they inhabit." ―The San Francisco Chronicle

"Visionary . . . rooted in a deep concern for nature and the land, . . . [these stories are] tough, relentless and clear. In a roundabout way they are confrontational because they ask basic questions about men and women, violence, work and loyalty." ―Hans Ostrom, The Morning News Tribune

Fidelity: Five Stories

by Wendell Berry

"Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world."--New York Times Book Review.

The Farm

by unknown author, Tom Rob Smith, Wendell Berry, Hector Abad

The international bestseller from the author of phenomenal Child 44 trilogy?Ķ

The Farm

If you refuse to believe me, I will no longer consider you my son.

Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden. But with a single phone call, everything changes.

Your mother...she's not well, his father tells him. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things. She's had a psychotic breakdown, and been committed to a mental hospital.

Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls: Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad... I need the police... Meet me at Heathrow.

Caught between his parents, and unsure of who to believe or trust, Daniel becomes his mother's unwilling judge and jury as she tells him an urgent tale of secrets, of lies, of a crime and a conspiracy that implicates his own father.

The Farm

by unknown author, Tom Rob Smith, Wendell Berry, Hector Abad

Closely knit Colombian siblings' internal rifts threaten to tear apart the hard-won legacy their father fought to establish against guerilla and paramilitary violence. An intimate and transgressive novel that confirms Héctor Abad as one of the great writers of Latin American literature today.

Pilar, Eva, and Antonio Ángel are the last heirs of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains of Colombia. The land has survived several generations. It is the landscape of their happiest memories but it is also where they have had to face the siege of violence and terror, restlessness and flight.

In The Farm, Héctor Abad illuminates the vicissitudes of a family and of a people, as well as of the voices of these three siblings, recounting their loves, fears, desires, and hopes, all against a dazzling backdrop. We enter their lives at the moment when they are about to lose the paradise on which they built their dreams and their reality.

The Farm

by unknown author, Tom Rob Smith, Wendell Berry, Hector Abad

The international bestseller from the author of phenomenal Child 44 trilogy?Ķ

The Farm

If you refuse to believe me, I will no longer consider you my son.

Daniel believed that his parents were enjoying a peaceful retirement on a remote farm in Sweden. But with a single phone call, everything changes.

Your mother...she's not well, his father tells him. She's been imagining things - terrible, terrible things. She's had a psychotic breakdown, and been committed to a mental hospital.

Before Daniel can board a plane to Sweden, his mother calls: Everything that man has told you is a lie. I'm not mad... I need the police... Meet me at Heathrow.

Caught between his parents, and unsure of who to believe or trust, Daniel becomes his mother's unwilling judge and jury as she tells him an urgent tale of secrets, of lies, of a crime and a conspiracy that implicates his own father.

The Farm

by unknown author, Tom Rob Smith, Wendell Berry, Hector Abad

A collector's edition, and the perfect gift for the stalwart Wendell Berry fan

First printed in 1995 by Gray Zeitz of the beloved Larkspur Press in Monterey, Kentucky, this gift edition is a beautiful reproduction of Wendell Berry’s book-length poem, illustrated with the original drawings by Carolyn Whitesel.

The Farm

by unknown author, Tom Rob Smith, Wendell Berry, Hector Abad

Farms are such exciting places for children to learn about and The Farm is a perfect way of introducing children to what they might find there. The book explains how much of the food we eat comes from a farm. Children will learn all about the various animals that live on the farm, how we take care of them and how they help feed and clothe us. Also described are the type of fruits, vegetables and grains that can be grown, how they are harvested and how they can be used to make other foods like bread and pie.

Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2022

by Wendell Berry

A new collection of poems and the companion volume to the popular bestseller This Day, Wendell Berry's Another Day is another stunning contribution to the poetry canon from one of America's most beloved writers
A companion to his beloved volume This Day and Wendell Berry's first new poetry collection since 2016, this new selection of Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials.
With the publication of this new edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry's work.

How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

by Wendell Berry

Thirteen new stories of the Port William membership spanning the decades from World War II to the present moment

For those readers of his poetry and inspired by his increasingly vital work as advocate for rational land use and the right-size life, these stories of Wendell Berry's offer entry into the fictional place of value and beauty that is Port William, Kentucky. Berry has said it's taken a lifetime for him to learn to write like an old man, and that's what we have here, stories told with grace and ease and majesty. Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living American authors, writing with the wisdom of maturity and the incandescence that comes of love.

These thirteen new works explore the memory and imagination of Andy Catlett, one of the well-loved central characters of the Port William saga. From 1932 to 2021, these stories span the length of Andy’s life, from before the outbreak of the Second World War to the threatened end of rural life in America.

How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

by Wendell Berry

Thirteen new stories of the Port William membership spanning the decades from World War II to the present moment
For those readers of his poetry and inspired by his increasingly vital work as advocate for rational land use and the right-size life, these stories of Wendell Berry's offer entry into the fictional place of value and beauty that is Port William, Kentucky. Berry has said it's taken a lifetime for him to learn to write like an old man, and that's what we have here, stories told with grace and ease and majesty. Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living American authors, writing with the wisdom of maturity and the incandescence that comes of love.
These thirteen new works explore the memory and imagination of Andy Catlett, one of the well-loved central characters of the Port William saga. From 1932 to 2021, these stories span the length of Andy's life, from before the outbreak of the Second World War to the threatened end of rural life in America.

Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer: Essays

by Wendell Berry

“A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones.”
First published in Harper’s magazine in the late 1980s, Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” challenges the idea circulating then (and now) that our advanced technological age is a good thing. The volume of reader response to his essay far exceeded any the magazine had seen before. Berry answered his critics with the longer essay "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” which is included here in this slim volume.
Each palm-size book in the Counterpoints series is meant to stay with you, whether safely in your pocket or long after you turn the last page. From short stories to essays to poems, these little books celebrate our most-beloved writers, whose work encapsulates the spirit of Counterpoint Press: cutting-edge, wide-ranging, and independent.

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story: A Port William Novel

by Wendell Berry

In the newest novel in the Port William series, Wendell Berry's beloved protagonist Andy Catlett tells the inspiring story of his grandfather, Marce Catlett, to his own children and grandchildren, and gives them a key to their place on the settled land they all love
Andy Catlett's story begins as his grandfather, Marce Catlett, rises in the dark to go from his farm, by horseback and train, to Louisville for the sale of his tobacco crop at the auction house. The price paid for each year's crop is determined and destroyed by the power of a single buyer, James B. Duke. This year is especially grim since the price offered to each grower is less than the expense of bringing the crop to market. A year's worth of labor is lost.
Marce returns to his family determined to discover some way to proceed. Many of his fellow farmers lack the resiliency and resourcefulness to continue, and the end for them is nearing. But only with the help of other neighbors and growers can a way be found that protects the farmers and keeps these rural families vital and in place.
The power and depth of this story--and of the many stories within the Port William Membership--resonate with love, memory, kindness, and a sense of eternity. In Marce Catlett, celebrated author Wendell Berry brings to life a character that the devoted readers of the series will cherish. This moving story is a testament to the goodwill that lives within the human heart and a stirring reminder that standing up for what we believe in is always a cause worth fighting for.

The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others.
Without historical understanding of this practice of dispossession—the displacement of Native peoples, the destruction of both the land and land-based communities, ongoing racial division—we are doomed to continue industrialism’s assault on both the natural world and every sacred American ideal. Berry writes, “To deal with so great a problem, the best idea may not be to go ahead in our present state of unhealth to more disease and more product development. It may be that our proper first resort should be to history: to see if the truth we need to pursue might be behind us where we have ceased to look.” If there is hope for us, this is it: that we honestly face our past and move into a future guided by the natural laws of affection. This book furthers Mr. Berry’s part in what is surely our country’s most vital conversation.

What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969-2017: (A Library of America Boxed Set)

by Wendell Berry

The indispensable writings of our foremost voice on the current ecological and cultural crisis, more relevant now than ever, in a special two-volume edition prepared in consultation with the author.

Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow technological innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism, and the vital role of rural, sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Now, in celebration of Berry's extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume boxed set edition of his nonfiction writings prepared in close consultation with the author.

Here in full are such landmark books as The Unsettling of America and Life Is a Miracle, along with generous selections from more than a dozen other volumes, revealing as never before the evolution of Berry's thoughts and concerns as a farmer, neighbor, citizen, teacher, activist, and ecological philosopher. Throughout he demonstrates that our existence is always connected to the land, and that even in a modern global economy local farming is essential to the flourishing of our culture, to healthy living and stable communities, and indeed to the continuing survival of the human species. Berry's essays remain timely, even urgent today, and will resonate with anyone interested in our relationship to the natural world and especially with a younger, politically engaged generation invested in the future welfare of the planet.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Two More Stories of the Port William Membership

by Wendell Berry

Fiction. Two stories of rural life from the author of WATCH WITH ME and FIDELITY, newly available in paperback from Gnomon. As a celebrator of the land and the turning of the seasons that govern us still, Wendell Berry is, indeed, our writer for all seasons -- Wade Hall, Lexington Herald-Leader. Wallace Stegner writes, It's hard to say whether I like [Berry] better as a poet, an essayist, or a novelist. He is all three, at a high level.

Wanderlust 2016 Hiking Wall Calendar: Trekking the Road Less Traveled

by Amber Lotus Publishing, Wendell Berry, Ursula Le Guin

Product Description


Celebrate the call of the open road with Wanderlust: Trekking the Road Less Traveled. The Wanderlust wall calendar celebrates the spirit of walking and the lure of adventures that await those who veer off the beaten path. For all our technological advances, we have not lost the yearning for a deep connection with our natural world.

A year of spectacular nature photography from all over the world on your wall.
Frameable artbook-quality printing.
The perfect gift for the hiking and outdoor enthusiast.
Showcases spectacular photographs of less-traveled paths, from New Zealand to Namibia and the woods of Washington State to Arches National Park, Utah.
Features inspiring quotes from great walking and hiking enthusiasts, including John Muir, Walt Whitman, Ursula LeGuin, and Wendell Berry.
Printed on FSC Certified Mixed Source Paper with soy-based inks.
Published by Amber Lotus, an independent carbon-negative US company that has planted more than half a million trees since 2008.
This calendar features US and Canadian legal holidays, phases of the moon, and important observances of the world's major religions.

One of the surest ways to rekindle our relationship with the outdoors is through the simple act of walking not with thoughts of arriving somewhere but for the sole purpose and sheer enjoyment of walking to encounter nature with wide-open curiosity. So lace up your boots and enjoy a year of adventure and awakening with Wanderlust.


About the Author


Amber Lotus Publishing is a carbon-negative independent publisher of mind body spirit themed calendars, greeting cards, journals, books, and wisdom decks. We create products that illuminate the sacred dimensions of everyday life mindfulness, healthy lifestyles, and earth awareness. Sharing the diversity of world cultures and sacred traditions as well as the inspiration and beauty of the natural world is our passion.

The Art of Loading Brush New Agrarian Writings

by Wendell Berry

In Berry's new book, The Art of Loading Brush, he is a frustrated advocate, speaking out against local wastefulness and distant idealism; he is a gentle friend, asserting, as he always has, the hope possible in caring for the world, and your specific place in it . . . The Art of Loading Brush is singular in Berry's corpus.--The Paris Review

[Berry] has never written better. --Booklist (starred review)

Wendell Berry's profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of Agrarian philosophy. Mr. Berry believes that American cultural problems are nearly always aligned with their agricultural problems, and recent events have shone a terrible spotlight on the divides between our urban and rural citizens. Our communities are as endangered as our landscapes. There is, as Berry outlines, still much work to do, and our daily lives--in hope and affection--must triumph over despair.

Mr. Berry moves deftly between the real and the imagined. The Art of Loading Brush is an energetic mix of essays and stories, including "The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age," which explores Agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World" is added here as the bookend of this developing New Agrarianism. Four stories extend the Port William story as it follows Andy Catlett throughout his life to this present moment. Andy works alongside his grandson in "The Art of Loading Brush," one of the most moving and tender stories of the entire Port William cycle. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.

Berry's essays, continuing arguments begun in The Unsettling of America 40 years ago, will be familiar to longtime readers, blending his farm work with his interests in literature old and new . . . Vintage Berry sure to please and instruct his many admirers.--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Another Day Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023

by Wendell Berry

A new collection of poems and the companion volume to the popular bestseller This Day, Wendell Berry's Another Day is another stunning contribution to the poetry canon from one of America's most beloved writers

A companion to his beloved volume This Day and Wendell Berry's first new poetry collection since 2016, this new selection of Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials.

With the publication of this new edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s work.

Spiritual Ecology The Cry of the Earth (2nd Edition)

by Thich Nhat Hanh, Winona LaDuke, Brian Swimme, Joanna Macy, Wendell Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Vandana Shiva, Satish Kumar, Thomas Berry, Bill Plotkin, John Stanley, Sandra Ingerman, Chief Oren Lyons, Chief Tamale Bwoya, David Robert Loy, Sr. Miriam MacGillis, Susan Murphy Roshi, Geneen Marie Haugen, Eleanor O'Hanlon, Jules Cashford, Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, Fr. Richard Rohr, Shephali Patel, Lyla June Johnston

The Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh was asked what we need to do to save our world. "What we most need to do," he replied, "is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”

Our present ecological crisis is the greatest man-made disaster this planet has ever faced—its accelerating climate change, species depletion, pollution and acidification of the oceans. A central but rarely addressed aspect of this crisis is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, and how this affects our relationship to the environment. There is a pressing need to articulate a spiritual response to this ecological crisis. This is vital and necessary if we are to help bring the world as a living whole back into balance.

The first edition of this book (published in 2013) fostered the emergence of the "Spiritual Ecology Movement," which recognizes the need for a spiritual response to our present ecological crisis. It drew an overwhelmingly positive response from readers, many of whom are asking the simple question, "What can I do?"

The 2016 expanded edition offers new chapters, including two from younger authors who are putting the principles of spiritual ecology into action, working with their hands as well as their hearts. It also includes a new preface and revised chapter by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, that reference two major recent events: the publication of Pope Francis's encyclical, "On Care for Our Common Home," which brought into the mainstream the idea that "the ecological crisis is essentially a spiritual problem"; and the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference, which saw representatives from nearly 200 countries come together to address global warming, including faith leaders from many traditions.

And, in Autumn 2021, we have issued a new edition, with a new updated preface from editor Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, who has also rewritten his chapter, “The Call of the Earth.”

Bringing together voices from Buddhism, Sufism, Christianity, and Native American traditions, as well as from physics, deep psychology, and other environmental disciplines, this book calls on us to reassess our underlying attitudes and beliefs about the Earth and wake up to our spiritual as well as physical responsibilities toward the planet.

"It's hard to imagine finding a wiser group of humans than the authors represented here, all of them both thinkers and do-ers in the greatest battle humans have ever faced. AN EPIC COLLECTION!" —BILL MCKIBBEN, founder 350.org

Spiritual Ecology is a superb collection of thoughtful pieces by people who have gone deep to understand our relations with the Earth. It comes at a crucial time for humanity." —BARRY LOPEZ, landscape photographer and author Arctic Dreams (winner National Book Award), Of Wolves and Men, Crossing Open Ground, About This Life

"THIS BOOK PROVIDES FRESH THINKING about the spiritual approaches of consciously and consistently making the right choices, each of us within our respective sphere of influence. As the world works towards a new global climate agreement in 2015, it is in our interest and in the interest of future generations to reflect on how we can individually and collectively contribute to addressing climate change by making our economies and lifestyles more sustainable, because solving climate change can help solve many of the issues the earth currently faces. Climate change is therefore both a challenge and an opportunity. I hope this book inspires and energizes many readers eager to rise to the greatest challenge ever to face humanity by realizing the transformative opportunities we have in front of us." —CHRISTIANA FIGUERES, Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

Sayings & Doings and an Eastward Look

by Wendell Berry

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The Unsettling of America (50th Anniversary Edition): Culture and Agriculture

by Wendell Berry

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