The Southern Nature Writers Project, Writing and Thinking About the Southern Landscape.

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Books & Essays

• A Place on Earth: A Novel

  

  Published: Counterpoint Press 2001
  
  Part ribald farce, part lyrical contemplation, Wendell Berry's novel is the story of a place-Port William, Kentucky-the farm lands and forests that surround it, and the river that runs nearby The rhythms of this novel are the rhythms of the land. A Place on Earth resonates with variations played on themes of change; looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found. This brings the revised 1983 edition back into print, the next book in our program to put all of Wendell Berry's fiction into print in revised and corrected uniform editions.

  
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  • Book Review:
    "This is not a book to read at a sitting. It needs to be savored. Written by a craftsman poet, every word is chosen with great care. Many of Berry's poems reveal the same fascination with the rhythms and cycles of rural living as A Place on Earth, just as his essays reflect his integrity and common sense." Newsday
    
    
  • Book Review:
    "A splendid, warm, heartfelt novel about countrymen by a countryman. . . What a pleasure it is to read a book about decent people who love or like or at least tolerate each other." -Wallace Stegner
    
    

• The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982

  

  Published: North Point Press 1987
  
  

  
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  • Book Review:
    "Wendell Berry's poetry is a validation of his decision nearly twenty years ago to give up the literary life in New York and seek a deeper bond with his ancestral home, a hillside farm in Henry County, Kentucky, on the Kentucky River. His straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament and family life, affirms a style that is resonant with the authentic... He can be said to have returned American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose." -- New York Times
    
    
  • Book Review:
    "Berry is one of those rare individuals who speak to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life, be they those of composing a poem, preparing a hill for planting, raising a family, working for the good of oneself and one's neighbors, or loving."-- The Bloomsbury Review
    
    
  • Book Review:
    "For all his earthiness, Mr. Berry is a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau . . . Ranging from the 'known' to the 'celestial,' from rich concreteness to prophetical intonations, Mr. Berry's Collected Poems establishes him as a major poet of our time."--The Baltimore Sun
    
    

• The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South

  

  Published: University of Georgia Press 1999
  
  The Woods Stretched for Miles gathers essays about southern landscape and nature from nineteen writers with geographic or ancestral ties to the region. Wendell Berry's chapter is entitled "The Making of a Marginal Farm."
  
  From the savannas of south Florida through the hardwood uplands of Mississippi to the coastal rivers of the Carolinas and the high mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the range in geography covered is equally broad. With insight and eloquence, these diverse talents take up similar themes: environmental restoration, the interplay between individual and community, the definition of wildness in an area transformed by human activity, and the meaning of our reactions to the natural world.
  
  Readers will treasure the passionate and intelligent honorings of land and nature offered by this rich anthology. With the publication of The Woods Stretched for Miles, southern voices establish their abiding place in the ever-popular nature writing genre.

  
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