No one could deny the nobility of Wendell Berry's dream of the sanctity of the soil. I will not comment on his techniques in Clearing,… they are all that we have read before by writers of equal talent in the free forms of William Carlos Williams. Occasionally he works skillfully at the traditional rhymed and metered verse, but Berry should be singled out for his vision. He is a poet who is a farmer, who is a professor of English, who cannot write an evil word about the work of living but must make his farm the podium from which to write eloquently of our relationship to the earth. He suffers his tasks in the field and in the barn gladly…. [He] celebrates the small, ordinary farmer who has no pretension to wealth but asks only that the earth return to him in kind the love and care...