They attached me to the earth. It is the experience of such attachment that Wendell Berry writes about in Farming: A Handbook. Indeed, the book has little to say about anything else; as much as any I can recall in recent years, it is a book of a single theme, played without significant variation. Berry has something he very badly wants to tell us. He said it in The Long-Legged House, a book of essays published in 1969, he said it again in The Hidden Wound (1970), an essay centered upon the author's experience of racism, and he says it yet once more in his new poems. The insistent didacticism becomes tiring; one soon gets the message….

What men have done, however, must be compared with what men could do; and here again Berry is explicit. He comes to us with a cure for our ills. (p. 472)

Essentially, Berry's poems...