In Wendell Berry’s New Collected Poems, the poet revisits his immensely popular Collected Poems, which the New York Times Book Review described as “a straight-forward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament and family life” that “affirms a style that is resonant with the authentic,” and “[returns] American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.”

In his 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, a handsome volume many will treasure. This book contains all the poems Berry wants to collect from previous collections, except no selections from been made from his ongoing sequence published as The Sabbath Poems.

Let us enlighten then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
That burn no hotter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger
Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves,
The garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life of radiance and fume
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than its roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

“Berry’s sage mind and poetic skills combine to skewer political arrogance, savage commercial folly, muse on growing old and lament a good dog’s death. Mindful of time and earth, of joy and love, Berry calls us to the hard work of a hope and peace and gratitude so incarnate that they rest ‘on the ground underfoot.’” —The Christian Century

Having lived and farmed with his wife Tanya in Kentucky for more than forty years, Wendell Berry is the author of over forty works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.