AIR
THE MAD FARMER, FLYING THE FLAG OF ROUGH BRANCH, SECEDES FROM THE UNION
Also by Wendell Berry
FICTION
The Discovery of Kentucky
Fidelity
The Memory of Old Jack
Nathan Coulter
A Place on Earth
Remembering
Two More Stories of the Port William Membership
Watch with Me
The Wild Birds
A World Lost
POETRY
The Broken Ground
Clearing
Collected Poems: 1957 - 1982
The Country of Marriage
Entries
Farming: A Hand Book
Findings
Openings
A Part
Sabbaths
Sayings and Doings
A Timbered Choir
Traveling at Home (with prose)
The Wheel
ESSAYS
Another Turn of the Crank
A Continuous Harmony
The Gift of Good Land
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work
The Hidden Wound
Home Economics
Recollected Essays: 1954 - 1980
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
Standing by Words
The Unforeseen Wilderness
The Unsettling of America
What Are People For?
For Jack Shoemaker
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I like the idea of a volume of “selected poems” because I like the ideas of culling and condensation and compactness. In making this book, I have culled a lot of poems and thus have achieved some condensation as a matter of course. I might have achieved compactness as well, if I had had the foresight and the good luck to write shorter poems. Having so often failed at brevity, and needing to represent my work at least adequately, I have had to sacrifice compactness in the interest of fairness to myself.
This selection contains none of the poems recently collected in A Timbered Choir. To have included work from that book would have made this one too large, and would have introduced the problem of representing adequately a distinct body of work.
W. B.
In a time that breaks in cutting pieces all around, when men, voiceless against thing-ridden men, set themselves on fire, it seems too difficult and rare to think of the life of a man grown whole in the world, at peace and in place. But having thought of it I am beyond the time I might have sold my hands or sold my voice and mind to the arguments of power that go blind against what they would destroy.
from The Broken Ground
THE APPLE TREE
for Ann and Dick O’Hanlon
In the essential prose
of things, the apple tree
stands up, emphatic
among the accidents
of the afternoon, solvent,
not to be denied.
The grass has been cut
down, carefully
to leave the orange
poppies still in bloom;
the tree stands up
in the odor of the grass
drying.
