Clearing

None of us, says Wendell Berry, can in a true sense own land. We can only hold it in trust. Clearing is a sequence of poems about the land he and his wife hold in trust: a farm they bought years ago as their abiding place, another they took over more recently to save from ecological disaster. Berry writes, first, of the land’s past, and of its use or abuse by earlier trustees. Then he makes poetry out of his own feeling for the place, and out of his loving labors on it— his efforts to restore it to its old fertility and beauty.

Technically, the verse ranges from a kind of cadenced prose, through the open forms of which Berry has long been a master, to the sometimes subtle, sometimes forthright use of rhyme and meter. Clearing is the most considerable volume of poetry yet to have come from an author whose circle of devotees steadily widens.