Since 1960 Wendell Berry has published five books of poetry, three volumes of essays and three novels. With the recent publication of two books of poetry, Farming: A Handbook and The Country of Marriage, and a volume of essays, A Continuous Harmony, Berry has come to fruition as a major voice in America. By far his best work is his most recent, and so to read him chronologically is to observe steady growth in depth, refinement, and certainty…. Wendell Berry's transformation … has been a steady clarification and improvement of essentially the same stuff, his poetry growing more obviously and naturally out of itself, his own life, and death.

Death is the primary fact to Wendell Berry. It is, and he cannot forget it; he derives from his death and the death of all that he loves, not from new fashions in poetry or sociology, but the fact that he...