April is National Poetry Month, the perfect time to pick up one of the many works by Wendell Berry, farmer, writer, educator, and poet. He has been writing and farming on his Kentucky farm since 1965.

Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food is a wonderful new collection of his essays from the last 30 years.  Michael Pollan notes, “to read the essays in this sparkling anthology, many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, is to realize just how little of what we are saying and hearing today Wendell Berry hasn’t already said, bracingly, before.”

Less well known is Berry’s poetry.  Like his other work, Berry writes with clarity and passion about the beauty of the land and the importance of family and community.  The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry gathers together his most personal, honest, and heartfelt reflections.

The New York Times Book Review writes, “[Berry's] straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament…affirms a style that is resonant with the authentic….He can be said to have returned American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.”

“

Put your hands
Into the earth.  Live close
To the ground.  Learn the darkness.
Gather round you all
The things that you love, name
Their names, prepare
To lose them.  It will be
As if all you know were turned
Around within your body….

”

(from Song in a Year of Catastrophe)